Liyanage Amarakeerthi was presented the award for the Best Novel (2008) and the award for the Best Collection of Short Stories (2000) at the National Literary Festival of Sri Lanka. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sinhala, and a Sinhala Instructor of the ISLE Program at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. His academic interests include a range of areas such as modern drama in Sinhala, translation theory and practice, the modern short story, western literary theory and criticism, and social / cultural studies of literature.

Maithree Wickramasinghe is a senior lecturer at the Department of English at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She is also a visiting lecturer on gender and women’s studies at the University of Colombo. Her teaching interests include literary / critical theory, and Sri Lankan women’s poetry. Her research work has explored a number of diverse issues including women and development, sexual harassment and violence against women, feminist research methodology, and gender in disaster management as well as gender in organizations / workplaces.

Senath Walter Perera obtained his MA and PhD from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Peradeniya. Though his postdoctoral research was on Indian, Kenyan and Caribbean fiction, he now focuses on Sri Lankan writing in English, especially the Sri Lankan Novel of Expatriation. Perera is the recipient of several Commonwealth and Fulbright awards and has served as Chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Eurasia). He was an Articles Editor for Postcolonial Text, is the Bibliography Representative in Sri Lanka for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and a member of the Gratiaen Trust. He has also been Editor of The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities since 1996.

Ranjini Obeyesekere taught in the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University till her retirement in 2003. She has previously taught in the Department of English at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and at the University of California, San Diego. Her publications include Sinhala Writing and the New Critics; An Anthology of Modern Writing from Sri Lanka (co-edited with C. Fernando), Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories from the Saddharma Ratnavaliya, and Sri Lankan Theatre in a Time of Terror and Yasodharawata.

Kakoli Ray is a senior researcher at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies where she works on globalization, migration and human rights. She is a scholar and also a practitioner of international migration issues. Prior to joining ICES, Dr. Ray has held leadership positions in the Caucases, Central Asia and the United States for international organizations. She has a doctorate in social sciences from Columbia University, USA.

Punyakante Wijenaike won the Gratiaen Prize in 1994 for her novel Amulet. She was also the winner of the State Literary Award for The Unbinding (2001) and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Anoma (1996). Her novel Giraya was adapted for television by Dr. Lester James Peiris. The rank Kalasuri Class 1 (literary achievement) was conferred on her by the Government of Sri Lanka in 1988, while the special title of Sahityaratna was conferred on her at the State Literary Festival in 2003. Her most recent publications include That Deep Silence (2009) and Coming to Terms (2006).

Sarath Rajapatirana is Vice President (Research) of the Institute of Economic and Institutional Development. Previously he was with the World Bank for twenty-five years, where he was an Economic Adviser, a Division Chief for trade and industry for Latin America and the Director and Team Leader of the 1987 World Development Report. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka where he was Chief of Money and Banking Research. He is the author/co-author of six books and more than forty papers published in refereed journals.

Ashley Halpé was appointed Chair of the Department of English at the University of Peradeniya in 1965. A scholar, artist, poet, and translator, he was the founding editor of the journal titled Navasilu and the author of numerous research articles. His publications include volumes of poetry such as Silent Arbiters (1976), Homing (1993) and Sigiri Poems (1995), a translation of the Sigiri Graffiti. His paintings have been exhibited in several countries, and he has produced and directed a number of plays in Sri Lanka and in the West.

Mick Moore is a political scientist and Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK, and specialises in governance issues. He completed his first research in Sri Lanka in 1975, and has returned to the country many times. His book The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 1985) was re-published in 2008.

Nishan de Mel, A.B. Hons. (Harvard), M.Phil (Oxon), D.Phil (Oxon), is an Economist. He has held several senior policy and research appointments in Sri Lanka. He was a Member, Presidential Task Force on Health Reforms (1997); Member, National Steering Committee on Social Security (1998-2000); Member, Presidential Committee on Tobacco and Alcohol (1997-2000); and Member, Board of Directors of the Sri Lanka Foundation (1997-2000). He was a lecturer in Economics at Oxford University (2002-2007) and a researcher at the Institute of Policy Studies Sri Lanka (1996-2000). He served as Executive Director of the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (2000) and Executive Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (2009).

Sivamohan Sumathy is attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.  Her interests are critical theory including Marxism and Feminism, performance studies and film theory. Her work ranges from studies of the nation state and militarism, Tamil and Muslim women’s expression of survival and resistance, displacement, to film, media, theatre practice and translation studies. She has also been involved in bringing different ethnic communities together into dialogue.

Wilfred Jayasuriya teaches literature at the American National College, an extension campus in Colombo, of a consortium of US, British and Australian universities. His publications include Sri Lanka’s Modern English Literature – A Case Study in Literary Theory, The Libyan Episode, Christine's Story and Time Traveller.

Lakmali Jayasinghe is a Researcher at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, and is a first-class English Honours graduate of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Her research interests include comparative literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and gender studies. She is also an editor, a writer and a photographer.

Frances Bulathsinghala, at the cost of attention to other “important” matters of childhood such as mathematics and science, became addicted at an early age to daydreaming in general, and writing poems and stories in particular. As an adult, she took to journalism and covered the 1998 – 2005 phase of Sri Lanka’s war-peace scenario for various newspapers in Sri Lanka and abroad. Having left mainstream journalism for a more humanitarian line of work, she is at the moment pursuing creative writing.

Ramani Gunatilaka is an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, and works as an independent consultant in Sri Lanka. She holds a BSc in economics from University College London, an MSc in development economics from the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in applied econometrics from Monash University. She has published in the areas of income distribution, poverty alleviation, rural development and labour market issues in Sri Lanka, and on the determinants of subjective well-being in rural and urban China.

Nira Wickramasinghe is attached to the Department of History and International Relations at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has been a World Bank Robert McNamara fellow, a Fulbright senior scholar at New York University, a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and more recently, a British Academy Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Among her publications are Civil Society in Sri Lanka: New Circles of Power, Dressing the Colonised Body: Politics, Clothing and Identity in Colonial Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities.

John Stifler is a writer and teacher of writing. Since 1984, he has taught in the Junior (3rd year) Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, and he regularly leads workshops for writers at many levels, ranging from high school to professionals and multi-talented people in many walks of life. He has written numerous feature articles for magazines and newspapers, on subjects ranging from music and literature to sports and nutrition. As a Fulbright Scholar, he taught at the Department of English, University of Peradeniya in 2008.

Dayan Jayatilleka is former Ambassador/Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in Geneva, the Chairman of the Governing body of the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the Vice President of the Human Rights Council (HRC). He is the author of Fidel’s Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro, published by Pluto Press (London) and the University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor). He is also a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Kanchuka Dharmasiri is currently reading for her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her areas of interest include theatre, particularly street theatre and Sinhala theatre, postcolonial studies, translation, visual culture, and early Buddhist women's writing. Kanchuka is a theatre director and a translator.

Chelva Kanaganayakam is professor of English at the University of Toronto and Director, Centre for South Asian Studies. He has published several books including Structures of Negation: the Writings of Zulfikar Ghose, Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and their World, Dark Antonyms and Paradise: the Poetry of Rienzi Crusz, and Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction.