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Sri Lanka-born Poet Wins Prestigious PEN
Fellowship
By a Staff Reporter
SAN FRANCISCO - PEN U.S.A., the American chapter of
the international literary organization
established by George Bernard Shaw in 1921, has
awarded the Rosenthal Fellowship to a South
Asian for the first time in its history. The
award was presented to Pireeni Sundaralingam, a
Sri Lankan-born Tamil currently resident in San
Francisco. She performed Aug. 3 at Desi Art in
the Diaspora, in Oakland, Calif., and recently
at Artwallah in Los
Angeles.
Sundaralingam often performs her
poetry to the accompaniment of Colm O'Riain's
haunting violin.
It has been a memorable
year for the young Oxford-educated Tamil poet:
in February, she was flown to London to feature
alongside Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidwa, Kaiser
Hoque and a host of other literary luminaries in
the English National Theatre's celebration of
South Asian writers. In early spring, her poetry
was selected for several anthologies (including
"So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of
Californian Poets) and she was invited to
co-edit "Writing the Lines of Our Hands," the
first anthology of South Asian Poetry in
America.
Later this year, Sundaralingam will be featured in a special issue on "America's
Emerging Writers" to be published by Ploughshares, one of the
top literary journals in the United States.
Born in Sri Lanka and educated in Great Britain, Sundaralingam's poetry examines
the many-facted aspects of exile, and the ways in which community may be found
within the situation of exile. The poems in her forthcoming first collection
(Margin Lands) move from fragmented personal memories of censorship and genocide
in Sri Lanka to universal images of immigration and repatriation in the West.
To hear sound samples or to read a selection of Sundaralingam's work, visit
www.wordandviolin.com.
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