Manuka Wijesinghe

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Manuka Wijesinghe (* 1963 in Colombo , Sri Lanka ) is a Sri Lankan writer . She lives in Colombo and Mainz .

Life

Manuka Wijesinghe grew up as the daughter of an engineer and an art teacher in Colombo. Her mother tongue is Sinhala, but she writes her literary works in English. After her first career as a dancer and actress in Colombo, she studied drama at the University of Maine, USA. She is married in Germany and has two grown children. After the children were born, she started writing. First she wrote a series of one-act plays for the Colombo theater as well as poems and short prose. Three novels followed later.

Manuka Wijesinghe also completed training in traditional healing methods and runs a private practice.

Literary works

Plays

  • Mad Cow
  • Flight 582 to Zurich
  • Marital Disadventure
  • The Affair
  • My way
  • karma

These one-act plays were performed in Colombo but did not appear in print. They treat current issues from politics and society in Sri Lanka in a satirical way. Content summaries of the pieces can be found on Wijesinghe's website.

Poetry and short prose

  • Silhouettes for Justice. Colombo 1994 (The poems and stories in this volume deal with the civil war in Sri Lanka and the connections between violence, terror and religion.)

Novels

  • Monsoons and Potholes. Perera Hussein Publishing House, Colombo 2006
  • Theravada Man. Bay Owl Press, Colombo 2009
    • German as: A man of the Middle Way. Translated by Reinhold Schein, Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg 2019
  • Sinhala Only. Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo 2014

The three novels form a trilogy in which the story of a family is unfolded over three generations and a period of almost a hundred years. The background to the plot is the story of the British colony Ceylon and later the independent Republic of Sri Lanka under changing regimes. The alliance between Buddhist clergy and Sinhala nationalist politics, which led to discrimination against the Tamil minority and ultimately to civil war, is viewed particularly critically.

Scientific work on Manuka Wijesinghe

  • "Plural Narratives of the Sri Lankan Nation in Manuka Wijesinghe's Theravada Man ", Isabel Alonso-Breto, Department of Modern Languages ​​and Literatures and English Studies, Universitat de Barcelona
  • "Rewritings of the Jātaka Tales in Colonial and Postcolonial Texts. A Fictional Evaluation of Buddhism in Postcolonial Sri Lanka: Manuka Wijesinghe's Trilogy", Geetha Ganapathy-Doré

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://manukawijesinghe.com/
  2. ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308739868_Plural_Narratives_of_the_Sri_Lankan_Nation_in_Manuka_Wijesinghe's_Theravada_Man
  3. ↑ http://publis-shs.univ-rouen.fr/eriac/index.php?id=216
personal data
SURNAME Wijesinghe, Manuka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sri Lankan writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Colombo , Sri Lanka