Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas brings together poetry written since Independence by poets living in Sri Lanka and across its diaspora. Its editors describe the anthology as an effort to make that writing more visible while placing poems across languages in conversation—without suggesting that poetry alone can resolve the political conflicts the work addresses.
This account draws on Sayari Debnath’s February 18, 2024, Scroll.in interview with editors Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett.
What the anthology brings together
As described in the interview, the book runs to more than 400 pages and features more than one hundred poets. It includes poems written in English and poems translated from Tamil and Sinhala. The contributors live in Sri Lanka and in the UK, US, Canada and Australia.
The collection ranges across traditional and open forms, concrete poetry, spoken word, and experimental writing that combines poetry and prose. An introduction supplies historical context. The editors’ aim is to let readers encounter Sri Lankan poetry across language and geography, including what they describe as migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. That is an editorial frame, not a claim that one anthology can represent every strand of the country’s poetry.
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How the editors chose poets and poems
The editors say they began by reading widely: existing anthologies, journals focused on Sri Lankan poetry, individual collections and academic work on Tamil and Sinhala poetics and politics. They tracked poets whose names recurred, built lists across three languages, and consulted poets and academics who could point them toward writers they might have missed.
They also invited submissions from poets in Sri Lanka and the diaspora. The open call brought in poets whose work had not yet been published. The final selection, then, grew from both published writing and new submissions, alongside individual editorial decisions.
Translation shaped the boundaries of what they could include. The editors say some poets had not been translated into English; in other cases, they were dissatisfied with translations available to them. They also set aside poets for whom they did not find poems they wanted to include. These are the editors’ descriptions of their choices and constraints, not a general judgment about the quality of Sri Lankan poetry or its translations.
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Why poems in different languages are mixed together
Rather than divide the anthology into Tamil, Sinhala and English sections, the editors place poems in different languages beside one another. They say this arrangement expresses a hope for conversation across language and makes the collection’s range visible on the page.
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What “Out of Sri Lanka” means
The title points both outward and inward: to poems written beyond the country by diaspora writers, and to poetry emerging from Sri Lanka, including work by poets who live there. Ravinthiran explained the two meanings in the interview:
“On the one hand, many diasporic poets refuse – because of atrocities, trauma, governmental corruption – to identify as ‘Sri Lankan’, and our book features many poems written ‘out’ of the country, as in, authored in the UK or US or Australia or Canada. But ‘out of Sri Lanka’ can also mean, ‘emerging from Sri Lanka’, which covers the poets living there too!”
The title therefore holds distance and origin together. It does not reduce Sri Lankan poetry to writing produced within national borders, or imply that poets abroad share a single relationship to national identity.
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The interview describes poems engaging with the Marxist JVP insurrections of the 1970s and 1980s, the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath, bombings connected in the article’s wording with the demonisation of Muslim communities, and the civil war between the government and the separatist Tamil Tigers.
The editors see the anthology as a record of difficult histories as well as a way to increase global recognition of Sri Lankan poets. Those are their stated purposes; the book’s historical range is not presented as an exhaustive account of the events or of every community’s experience of them.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Gaps the editors acknowledge
The editors say they could not include Malayaha Tamil poets. They cite difficulty finding translations they considered good and trouble obtaining texts from Sri Lanka during lockdown. They explicitly express the hope that others will attend to the community’s traditions and cultural work. Their explanation describes a limit in the anthology’s access and selection process, not a lack of artistic value in Malayaha Tamil poetry.
They also say Veddah language and literature were beyond their expertise. The book includes Burgher poets writing in English, but not Burgher-language work rooted in Portuguese or Dutch. These absences matter when reading the anthology’s ambition: it opens a broad view of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry, but does not claim to contain every language tradition.
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Recognition and the editors’ next hopes
Debnath’s interview reports that the book received a Poetry Book Society Special Recommendation in the UK and was named a Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. The article also recounts the editors’ anecdotes about enthusiastic launch audiences, bookings from literary festivals and organizations, and readers who told them the book made a good Christmas gift. Those anecdotes are not sales or readership figures.
In the 2024 interview, the editors also described hopes for a website with recordings of poems in their original languages and an online network for Sri Lankan poets. These were future ambitions at the time of the interview, not evidence that either project is now operating.
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