He was quintessentially a renaissance humanist Source:Dailymirror Jayati Weerakoon passed away on July 29, 2021 in Austin, Texas. He was born in 1928 in Madakumburumulla, Sri Lanka. He went to schools in Mirihanegama and completed his school education at Maliyadeva College in Kurunegala. He was an ardent Indian Classical music lover and studied Indian classical music and was playing the Dilruba in Radio Ceylon concerts at a young age. He studied Civil Engineering at the University of Peradeniya and graduated in 1950. Jayati was quintessentially a renaissance humanist, as the breadth and range of his expertise and scholarly interests bear evidence. He recently published a book Buddhist Prints with Descriptive Poems containing extraordinarily sensitive and erudite translations of Piyadasa Sirisena’s poetry that accompanied M. Sarlis’s paintings in the 1929 original. Not limited to academic pursuits, he was also an avid hobbyist who had an amazing can-do attitude and undertook to ...
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Watershed in Sinhala literature Source:Sundayobserver Seventy-six years have passed since Martin Wickramasinghe wrote his masterpiece Gamperaliya (Uprooted) and sixty-four years have passed since he wrote Viragaya (Dispassion). When asked about the highest service that Martin Wickramasinghe rendered to Sinhala literature, most critics say it is to write the first realistic novel in Sinhalese – Gamperaliya, or to write the best Sinhala novel in realism–Viragaya. But if you look into some other Sinhala writers, especially Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Siri Gunasinghe, Gunadasa Amarasekara, you can see that they also endowed us with some good novels, one can say better than Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya and Viragaya. Sophisticated readership The best service that Martin Wickramasinghe rendered to Sinhala literature was to build a sophisticated readership. His novels along with Kali Yugaya (Age of Kali), Yugantaya (Destiny) and short story collections, such as Gaheniyak (A Woman) and Wahallu (Serfs) helped a lot in this regard. ...
