Speaker

Nayomi Apsara

Nayomi Apsara is a writer, director, poet, and curator. In 2021, she made her entry into the literary world with her debut poetry collection titled Throw Me Mountains. Nayomi was a panellist at the New Ink Literary Forum in 2022. 

 As a filmmaker, Nayomi’s debut short film, The Tea is Cold (2022), was recognized at the Busan International Short Film Festival, where it had its Asian premiere, and at the Jaffna International Cinema Festival. Nayomi became a fellow of the International Film Business Academy in 2023 at Busan Asian Film School, South Korea. She was also a fellow at Curatorial Intensive South Asia in 2018, at Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi, India.

 In addition to her achievements in the arts, Nayomi has expertise in commercial writing and advertising. She previously spent over 15 years in the corporate sector in Sri Lanka and overseas.

Top Titles

• Throw Me Mountains (2021)

Speaker

Nihal Arthanayake

Nihal Arthanayake is an acclaimed broadcaster, journalist and TV presenter.  He currently presents Radio 5 Live’s Afternoon Show in the UK.  His extensive knowledge of music, and inimitable storytelling enable him to secure outstanding features for his radio shows. His unique interviewing style was recognised at the BBC Radio and Music Awards where he won Interview of the Year in 2019.  Nihal has made a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and in 2021 he presented Nihal’s Olympic Odyssey for BBC1 from Tokyo. He is a regular on our TV screens with appearances on shows like The Hit List, Mastermind and House of Games. In 2022, his debut book Let’s Talk was published by Trapeze and received stellar reviews.

Top Titles

• Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations (2022)

Speaker

Afdhel Aziz

Afdhel Aziz is on a mission to solve one of the biggest problems facing individuals and companies in the 21st century: how to find purpose and meaning in their work and unlock the enormous power of business to do good in the world. He is the Founder and Chief Purpose Officer of Conspiracy of Love, a global purpose consultancy (and certified B Corp) with Fortune 500 clients like Adidas, PepsiCo, Mondelez, Microsoft and more. He is also the Co-Founder of Good is the New Cool, a creative company and content incubator focused on creating positive stories that fill the Hope Gap. 

Afdhel is an internationally renowned keynote speaker, featured at the Cannes Lions, YPO, SXSW, Forbes CMO Summit, Advertising Week, Conscious Capitalism, and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Based in Los Angeles, he writes The Power Of Purpose column for Forbes.

Top Titles

• Good is the New Cool: Market Like You A Give a Damn (co-authored with Bobby Jones, 2016)

• Good is the New Cool: The Principles of Purpose (co-authored with Bobby Jones, 2021)

Speaker

Artika Bakshi

An avid reader, a teacher, a book critic, a passionate writer, but most importantly a mother, Artika Aurora Bakshi lives in a world of words. Her books, My Little Sikh Handbook, My Little Sikh Handbook 2: Ardas, and My Little Sikh Handbook: Travel Journal, My Little Sikh Handbook: The Mighty Sikh Empire, were well-received. She is currently working on her fifth book . 

Artika’s first story, All She Had Left, was published online by Story Mirror, whilst Hold On To Me, a collection of her short stories, is available online as an ebook. Artika’s quotes are on Instagram as Soul_Nightingale_Artika and on Facebook as Soul Nightingale by Artika Aurora Bakshi. Artika contributes to various publications, and is on the editorial panel of Nishaan. 

Top Titles

• My Little Sikh Handbook (2018)

• My Little Sikh Handbook 2: Ardas (2019) 

• Hold On To Me (2019)

Speaker

Mary Beard

Cambridge Classics Professor Mary Beard is known across the world. She has written numerous books including the prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, best-selling SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome and the highly-acclaimed Women & Power, all of which have been translated into many languages. Her most recent book, Twelve Caesars – Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, looks at the representation in art and culture of the image of the Roman emperor.

Mary has presented several BBC TV series including Meet the Romans, Civilisations and The Shock of the Nude exposing the history of the naked body in Western art. Mary also writes a thought-provoking blog, A Don’s Life. For services to Classical scholarship, Mary was made a Dame in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list 2018 and is a trustee of the British Museum. Her new book, Emperor of Rome, explores one of the most extraordinary roles in history.

Top Titles

• SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

• Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017)

• Emperor of Rome (2023)

Speaker

Simon Bell

Simon is a social entrepreneur. Born in Sri Lanka, in 2007 he formed a company with three partners to invest in sustainable tourism and agribusiness ventures in Sri Lanka. AMBA Estate exports high-value organic products and offers guests a unique agro-tourism experience in the Uva Highlands. The company is developing additional tourism ventures in Sri Lanka. He is a founding member and/or director of various associations, including the Ceylon Artisanal Tea Association, Lanka Coffee Association and Ceylon Eco-Lodge Owners Association.

Previously, as a Director at global consulting firm Kearney, he advised many of the world’s leading firms on their global strategy. He developed the Global Services Location Index and authored numerous articles and white-papers – on globalisation, regional competitiveness and sustainable business. He has been a frequent speaker at international conferences and a regular commentator on global trends in various media, including The Wall Street Journal, Economist, FT and CNN.

Speaker

Jasbinder Bilan

Jasbinder is the Costa Award winning author of Asha and the Spirit Bird, Tamarind and the Star of Ishta and Aarti and the Blue Gods. In her writing she loves creating magical worlds inspired by her love of nature and wild places. Jasbinder was born on a farm close to the foothills of the Himalaya and now lives in a wooded valley near Bath with her husband, two teenage boys and dog Enzo. Her latest book, Xanthe and the Ruby Crown, is inspired by her hometown of Nottingham and brings magic to an everyday setting.

Top Titles

     Asha and the Spirit Bird (2019)

    Tamarind and the Star of Ishta (2020)

   Xanthe and the Ruby Crown (2023)

Speaker

Sam Bleakley

Sam is a geographer, travel writer, filmmaker, presenter and surf contest commentator. Born and raised in Cornwall, Sam has a particular interest in sustainable tourism with a lasting impact. Sam has BA and MA in Geography from Pembroke College, the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from Falmouth University (and the University of the Arts London) on travel writing and surf exploration in Haiti. 

Sam’s work on cultural tourism and surfing often focuses on areas that are post-conflict or post-environmental disaster, where grassroots surf communities and small-scale tourism ventures provide a wider lens to understand sustainability, diversity, inclusivity, blue health, coastscapes, and surfing’s potential to inspire positive change. 

He produces an adventure activist series called Brilliant Corners, documenting responsible tourism and the power of surfing for social good in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Sam also hosts the live broadcast for the World Surf League and International Surfing Association World Longboard Championships.

Top Titles

• Surfing Brilliant Corners (2010)

• Mindfulness and Surfing: Reflections for Saltwater Souls (2016)

• Mindful Thoughts for Surfers: Tuning in to the tides (2020)

Speaker

Tom Parker Bowles

Tom Parker Bowles is an award winning food writer, and Restaurant Critic for The Mail on Sunday. He’s a monthly columnist for Country Life, as well as Food Editor of Esquire and a Contributing Editor to Conde Nast Traveller. 

He is also a regular critic on BBC’s Masterchef, and the author of eight books. His ninth, Cooking and the Crown, will be published in late 2024. 

Top Titles

• Let’s Eat: Recipes from My Kitchen Notebook (2012)
  

• Fortnum & Mason: The Cook Book (2016)

• Cooking and the Crown (2024)

Speaker

Nicholas Brookes

Nicholas Brookes is an author and journalist from South London. His first book, An Island’s Eleven: The Story of Sri Lankan Cricket, was named Cricket Book of the Year by Wisden, The MCC/Cricket Society and The Sunday Times Sports Book Awards. He has covered the sport for publications including The Cricket Monthly, The Nightwatchman, Wisden, CricBuzz and The Cricketer.

 Top Titles

• An Island’s Eleven: The Story of Sri Lankan Cricket (2022)

Speaker

Geraldine Coates

Geraldine Coates is a professional writer whose specialist subject is gin. She is a pioneer of the great gin revival, having published the first book on the topic in over thirty years: Classic Gin, which is widely regarded as the gin bible. She has written regularly for a number of national and international publications and her other books include The Mixellany Guide to Gin and Gin the Essential Guide for Gin Aficionados.

She is Founding Editor of the world’s first website devoted to gin, and has spent the last 20 years talking about gin, hosting gin masterclasses for consumers, and writing training programmes as well as promotional material for some of the UK’s biggest gin companies. She acts as a consultant to the gin industry and has helped to develop a number of successful gin brands. She is also the course lecturer for the UK’s first ever officially recognised gin qualification, the Edinburgh Whisky Academy’s Gin Diploma. Geraldine was born and brought up in Sri Lanka.

Top Titles

• Classic Gin (2000)

• The Mixellany Guide to Gin (2009)

• Gin: The Essential Guide for Gin Aficionados (2018)

Speaker

Miguel Cunat

Based in Sri Lanka since 2003, Miguel is an entrepreneur and consultant with extensive experience in building innovative travel and tourism businesses. In 2005 he co-founded Sri Lanka In Style, a leading local Destination Management Company. Miguel is the Conde Nast Top Traveller Specialist for Sri Lanka and helps put together journeys around Sri Lanka for the highly discerning. More recently, Miguel founded Sustainable Sri Lanka, a consulting firm with a mission to help the Sri Lankan tourism industry adopt and comply with international sustainability standards.

An avid hiker and trail designer Miguel is also the founding father of The PEKOE Trail, Sri Lanka’s new and first long distance hiking trail, currently being developed with the generous support and funding of the European Union (EU) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Speaker

Chevaan Daniel

Chevaan Daniel is a former TV news anchor. He is the Group Director of The Capital Maharaja Organization, Sri Lanka’s largest TV & news media network. He currently sits on the Global Advisory Board of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs in the USA. A Fulbright Scholar, an Eisenhower Global Fellow and an Asia 21 Fellow, Chevaan is an internationally recognised speaker. He was also the UN-OCHA Maître de Cérémonie for the World Humanitarian Summit – Global Consultation in Geneva, and led the Sri Lankan delegation to the Bali Process’ Modern Day Slavery Summit in Perth, Australia. Known for his role in ‘Gammadda’, an award-winning rural development movement, Chevaan is also a published author specialising in the subject of ancient Sri Lanka.

Top Titles: 

• Island of Antiquity (2020)

Speaker

Channa Daswatte

Channa Daswatte graduated in 1991 and joined the architectural consultancy of Geoffrey Bawa. He later founded MICD Associates in partnership with Murad Ismail in 1998. Based in Sri Lanka, much of his work has been built on the island, on the Indian Ocean rim. Channa has been in architectural education since 1992, teaching at both the City School of Architecture and the University of Moratuwa. He continues to be an examiner at both institutions. 

The author of several books including Sri Lanka Style with Dominic Sansoni and the Colonial Period Furniture in the Geoffrey Bawa Collection, Channa has also written and edited extensively for magazines and journals including A+U Japan on the architecture of Sri Lanka on the 100th birth anniversary of Geoffrey Bawa. From 2015 to 2019, he held the post of Chairman of the Galle Heritage Foundation. He is a trustee of the Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts and a founding committee member of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – Sri Lanka.

Top Titles

• Sri Lanka Style: Tropical Design and Architecture (2006) 

• Colonial Period Furniture in the Geoffrey Bawa Collection (2012)

Chef

Emily Dobbs

Emily Dobbs is an acclaimed chef of ten years, having worked at The Dock Kitchen, Ducksoup, Petersham Nurseries, Spring and Italo restaurants in London, before becoming the head chef at Palm Hotel in Sri Lanka. In 2017, Dobbs set up the successful Sri Lankan-influenced street food stall Weligama – hailed by the Evening Standard as ‘utterly fantastic’ – which went on to become the title of her first cookbook. Her second publication, The Spice Box – a creative guide to using spices and tasting new worlds – is out now with Laurence King Publishing. Emily’s food is heavily inspired by Sri Lanka, yet led by British seasons and fresh local produce. She is currently the head chef at London’s Lorian Deli and lives in East London. 

Top Titles

• Weligama: Recipes from Sri Lanka (2017)

• The Spice Box: Taste New Worlds (2023)

Speaker

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, fiction and essays. For fifteen years she was the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, and the body has been a central preoccupation in her work—a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation.

Since her debut, Countries of the Body, which won the Forward Prize for best first collection (2006), she has sought joineries between the lyric and the political. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017) headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award. Her novels, The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Small Days and Nights (2019), have been shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. A God at the Door, her 2021 poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Top Titles

• Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017)

• Small Days and Nights (2019)

• A God at the Door (2021)

Speaker

Sachi Ediriweera

Sachi Ediriweera is an award-winning designer and graphic novelist. His graphic novel, Lionborn, was the first English language graphic novel to be produced by a Sri Lankan. Apart from his illustration work, which has been featured in numerous anthologies and online short comics, he has also built a career as a filmmaker. His work has been screened at international film festivals in the USA, Germany, South Korea and Australia. 

Sachi divides his time between Colombo and Dubai where he also works as a senior creative for the advertising industry. He was named a ‘Creative to Watch’ by Campaign Middle East in 2021 and won the Young Lynx award in 2022.

Top Titles

• Lionborn (2017)

• Wayfinder (2020)

• Enlightened (2023)

Speaker

Nizrana Farook

Nizrana Farook was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the beautiful landscapes of her home country find their way into the stories she writes. Her first book, The Girl Who Stole an Elephant, was the UK’s biggest selling children’s debut of the year. Featuring a feisty girl-thief named Chaya and a loveable elephant, it was longlisted for the Blue Peter Award and the Jhalak Prize. Three more books followed, all set in a fictional Sri Lanka. Nizrana has a master’s degree in writing for young people and lives with her family in Hertfordshire, UK.

Top Titles

• The Girl Who Stole an Elephant (2020)

• The Boy Who Met a Whale (2021)

• The Boy Who Saved a Bear (2023)

Speaker

Sebastian Faulks

Sebastian Faulks is the author of many books and a frequent visitor to Sri Lanka, coming first in 1981 to play cricket with a team from the Guardian newspaper. His latest novel, The Seventh Son, is out in September 2023.

Other books include the French trilogy, a James Bond tribute called Devil May Care, Human Traces, Engleby and A Possible Life. He lives in London with his wife Veronica and their whippet.

Top Titles

• Birdsong (1993)

• Snow Country (2021)

• The Seventh Son (2023)

Speaker

Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research; he is also UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. His book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was described ‘not just the most important history book in  years, but the most important in decades’ (Berliner Zeitung). It was named one of the Sunday Times Books of the Decade (2010-19). His next book, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World was awarded the Carical Prize for Social Sciences in 2019. His most recent book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History that looks at the past and present through the lens of the natural environment. ‘Humanity has transformed the Earth’ said the Financial Times; ‘Frankopan transforms our understanding of history.’

Top Titles

• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015)

• The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018)

• The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023)

Speaker

Fabienne Francotte

Fabienne Francotte (b. 1959, Belgium) exploits the possibilities of fabric, metal and clay in her engagement with the aftermath of trauma, abuse and migratory displacement. Her work often draws from her observations and experiences of people around her, including her own – transgressing the boundaries of culture and social and economic classes. She has also been writing since 1972. Journaling stories, memories, collecting feelings and souvenirs, recording a manifesto about a nomadic life and the many communities met on the way. Today she has 86 diaries.

Since shifting to Sri Lanka in 2016, she has concerned herself with a range of social issues present in Sri Lanka such as education, the business of sex, and religious tolerance. Her training as a calligrapher is visible in her drawings which exhibit a similar ritualistic execution, balance and controlled gestures and composition. Fabienne’s work has been presented at several solo and group exhibitions in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy and South Asia.

Speaker

Ella Frears

Originally from Cornwall and based in London, Ella Frears works at the intersection of poetry and visual art. Her collection Shine, Darling was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and her collaborative installation The Six Pillars of Modernism was on show at Tate St Ives. 

Ella has been selected for a number of residencies including with the Dartington Trust, Knole House in Kent (National Trust), Royal Holloway University’s physics department writing about the Cassini Spacecraft, and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton for which she wrote her experimental publication I AM THE MOTHER CAT, (Rough Trade Books). In 2023 she was the Creative Fellow for the environmental history department at Exeter University. 

Ella hosts and co-hosts shows for Soho Radio and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. 

Top Titles

• Shine, Darling (2020)

• I AM THE MOTHER CAT (2021)

Speaker

A.C. Grayling

C. Grayling CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSA FRSL is the Founder and Principal of New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, and its Professor of Philosophy. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of over thirty books of philosophy, biography, history of ideas, and essays.

He has contributed as a columnist to leading newspapers in the UK, US and Australia, and to BBC radio and the World Service, for which he did the annual Exchanges at the Frontier series. He has also often appeared on television. A. C. Grayling has twice been a judge on the Booker Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of Humanists UK, Patron of the Defence Humanists, Honorary Associate of the Secular Society, and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Top Titles

• The God Argument (2013)

• The Frontiers of Knowledge (2021)

• Philosophy and Life (2023)

Chef

Karan Gokani

Karan grew up in Mumbai and moved to England in 2005 to study law at the University of Cambridge. Even as a practising solicitor, Karan’s passion for food and hospitality never faded. In 2012, he left his legal career at a city law firm, travelling across India and Sri Lanka to immerse himself in the food and culture of both countries. The Sethi siblings and Karan opened Hoppers, a Sri Lankan and South Indian restaurant in Soho in 2015, followed by sites in Marylebone and King’s Cross.

Karan has written travel features and recipes on Sri Lanka and southern India for major national and international publications including The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveller. His hotly anticipated debut cookbook was released in Autumn 2022, rapidly topping bestseller lists and telling a personal story of the inspiration behind Hoppers and the people and places that shaped it. 

Top Titles

• Hoppers (2022) 

Speaker

Niki Gomez

Niki Gomez helps busy people get to the root cause of their illnesses, fixing their lifestyle habits through what they eat, how they manage stress, move and sleep. 

With a certification in Functional Medicine Health Coaching from the USA, she’s no stranger to work stress as she previously had a career in marketing in Europe and Asia, including at MAS, one of Sri Lanka’s most innovative companies. She currently lives in Mumbai. 

Speaker

Guy Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne is a novelist, playwright and video artist. Their first novel In Our Mad and Furious City won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize in the UK and the Authors Club Award. It was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

They served as Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and on literary prize committees including the Goldsmiths Prize (2019) and the Rathbones Folio Prize (2023).

Top Titles

• In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

• Mister, Mister (2023)

Speaker

Kanishka Gupta

Kanishka Gupta is a literary agent, writer and publishing commentator best known for his widely acclaimed series for Scroll.in, called Publishing and the Pandemic. He is the founder of Writer’s Side, the largest literary agency and consultancy in South Asia. Gupta has been credited for single-handedly popularising literary representation in the subcontinent. 

He represents a range of highly accomplished debut authors as well as award-winning writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the 2022 International Booker Prize winner Daisy Rockwell. His other prominent authors include the Booker-shortlisted Avni Doshi, the Windham-Campbell prize-winning novelist and poet Jerry Pinto, multi-award-winning novelist Anees Salim, Tamil writer B. Jeyamohan, Lindsay Pereira, Ranjit Hoskote, and Rijula Das among others. He has also worked closely with the 2022 Man Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka and represents his next two books in South Asia. Kanishka’s first novel was long-listed for the Asian Booker Prize in 2009 and published in 2010.

Top Titles

• History of Hate (2010)

Speaker

Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera is internationally acclaimed for fiction that explores the key themes of our times – political, ecological, economic – through novels and stories. His fiction over the last thirty years include Reef, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994, and The Match, the ground-breaking cricket novel. Noontide Toll (2014) captures a vital moment in post-war Sri Lanka through linked stories, whilst Suncatcher (2019), is a story of divided loyalties and endangered friendship in the turbulent 1960s. 

In 2023, Romesh was chair of judges for the Gratiaen Prize in Sri Lanka. He will be judging the International Booker Prize in 2024. He also chaired the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as judging Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2013 and The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award among others. He has taught creative writing at universities and schools and has run workshops around the world, which have featured in the top ten lists of The UK Sunday Times and The Telegraph. He is also the co-author of the Writers’ & Artists’ Companion to Novel Writing.

Romesh was born in Colombo and lives in London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received a National Honour in Sri Lanka.

Top Titles

• Reef (1994)

• Noontide Toll (2014)

• Suncatcher (2019)

Speaker

Amanthi Harris

Amanthi Harris grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and in London, UK. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. Her novel Beautiful Place was published by Salt Publishing (UK) and Pan Macmillan India. Lantern Evening, a novella, won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies including Best British Short Stories 2020 and broadcast on BBC Radio4. Her most recent short story for radio, Crinkum Crankum was broadcast in 2023 and is available to listen to online at the BBC website. She currently lives in the mountains of southern Spain.

Top Titles

• Lantern Evening (2016)
  

• Beautiful Place (2019)

Speaker

Will Harris

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan University Press in the US. He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

He helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule, and co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio with Delaina Haslam in 2022. He currently works in extra-care homes and is a Visiting Poetry Fellow at UEA working towards a community-led archive of poets’ work.

Top Titles

• Rendang (2020)

• Brother Poem (2023)

Speaker

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Kiran Millwood Hargrave (FRSL) is an internationally bestselling, award winning novelist for children and adults. Her children’s books include The Girl of Ink & Stars, Julia and the Shark, and most recently the first in her major new The Geomancer Trilogy, In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen. Her fiction for adults, The Mercies and The Dance Tree, have won international accolades such as the Prix Rive Gauche, a Betty Trask Award and an NYT Notable Book. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and optioned for stage and screen. She lives in Oxford with her husband, artist Tom de Freston, their daughter, and two cats.

Top Titles

• The Girl of Ink & Stars (2016)

• The Mercies (2022)

• In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen (2023)

Speaker

Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch is an award-winning writer, journalist, former barrister and filmmaker, known for storytelling on culture, identity and social justice. She presents flagship BBC documentary series Africa Rising, Enslaved – a 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson – and podcasts through Born in Me Productions, which she founded.

Afua’s book Decolonising My Body blends memoir and narrative non-fiction to examine beauty, rituals and ancestry as an approach to radical justice. Her previous books include the bestselling Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018), winner of the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, Equal To Everything (2019), a bestselling book about the UK Supreme Court, and Empire: Look Again (2021). Afua is a professor of Journalism at the University of Southern California, a long-time journalist and contributor to publications including The Guardian Newspaper, The New York Times, American and British Vogue, where she is also an associate editor.

Top Titles

• Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018)

• Equal To Everything: Judge Brend and the Supreme Court (2019)

• Decolonising My Body (2023)

Speaker

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony is a born polymath; juggling writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a hugely successful television series.

He is also an acclaimed writer for adults. He was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, and three continuation novels for James Bond. Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was serialised on BritBox and televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, began filming in 2023. His new series, featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz, includes five books so far.

Anthony is responsible for creating some of the UK’s most beloved television series including Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War, the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA. Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.

Top Titles

• With a Mind to Kill (2022 – final James Bond novel)

• Nightshade: Revenge (2023 – the latest in the Alex Rider series)

• Close to Death (2023 – the latest in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series)

Speaker

Ameena Hussein

Ameena Hussein is a Sri Lankan author and co-founder of the Perera-Hussein Publishing House. Her non-fiction book Chasing Tall Tales and Mystics: Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka won the State Literary Prize for Humanities, 2020 and was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize. Her novel The Moon in the Water was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Award and the Dublin IMPAC. She has also written two award-winning collections of short stories, Fifteen and Zillij, as well as three children’s books. Ameena was one of the judges for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Top Titles

• The Moon in the Water (2009)

• Chasing Tall Tales and Mystics: Ibn Battuta in Sri Lanka (2020)

Speaker

Azara Jaleel

Azara Jaleel is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of ARTRA Magazine, a Sri Lankan Modern & Contemporary Art Magazine established in 2012. Having published over 65 editions, she has interviewed more than 1000 art personalities including the late Laki Senanayake, Barbara Sansoni and Ena de Silva. She has worked with art academics, critics, and historians of local and international repute including C. Anjalendran, David Robson, Ismeth Raheem, the late Prof. Qadri Ismail in building an archive of art essays, interviews and critiques through the years. In her capacity as ARTRA Director, she has partnered with established art galleries, festivals, foundations, embassies and banks in increasing the consumption of Sri Lankan Modern & Contemporary Art. Azara received her BA (Hons.) in English from the Department of English, University of Colombo and completed Postgraduate Studies & Academic Courses in International Studies, Marketing & Communications from BCIS (SL), CIM (UK) and University of Virginia (USA).

Speaker

Amanda Jayatissa

Amanda Jayatissa loves to read disturbing books with shocking plot twists, so it seemed logical to her that she should attempt to write disturbing books with shocking plot twists. When she isn’t recovering from a self-induced book hangover, she works tirelessly as the chief taste tester at the cookie shop she co-owns.

She grew up in Sri Lanka and has lived in the California bay area and British countryside, before relocating back to her sunny island, where she lives with her husband and two Tasmanian-devil-reincarnate huskies.

My Sweet Girl is her first thriller, and her second, titled You’re Invited, was published in 2022. Her third novel, Island Witch, is inspired by Sri Lankan folklore and will be published in February 2024.

 Top Titles

• My Sweet Girl (2021)

• You’re Invited (2022)

• Island Witch (2024)

Speaker

Manu Joseph

Manu Joseph is an Indian novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is the author of three novels, including The Illicit Happiness of Other People. His novels have been widely translated. He is the winner of The Hindu Literature Prize and the American Pen Open Book Award, among other honours. His debut novel, Serious Men has been adapted for film. He is also the creator of the Netflix comedy, Decoupled. As editor-in-chief of the Indian newsweekly OPEN, he ran what is widely known in India as ‘The Radia Tapes’ which exposed how corporate lobbying works on influential journalists. A popular columnist, he used to write the ‘Letter from India’ column for the international edition of The New York Times. 

Top Titles

• Serious Men (2010)

• The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012)

• Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous (2017)

Speaker

Sunela Jayewardene

Sunela Jayewardene is recognized as ‘Sri Lanka’s leading environmental architect’ (Time, March 2007; India Today, 2008). Her award-winning projects include, Jetwing Vil Uyana, Colombo Court, Rainforest Ecolodge, Jetwing Kaduruketha, Camellia Hills and several private homes in Sri Lanka and India. Inspired by Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial cultural traditions, her primary design impulse has been serious concern for the ecology of site and sustainability of human habitats. Her work has been recognized internationally and Echelon listed her amongst ‘50 Most Powerful Women in Sri Lanka’, 2013 & 2014. Sunela was the founder and first Chairperson of the Federation of Environmental Organizations (FEOSL) and is an Advisor to the GOSL. 

She is also the author of The Line of Lanka – Myths and Legends of an Island and is currently writing Ravana’s Lanka for Penguin India. Now retired from architecture, Sunela lives at Dunvila, her rewilded forest on the border of Wasgomuva National Park.

Top Titles

• The Line of Lanka: Myths and Memories of an Island (2017)

Speaker

Chamintha Jayasinghe

Chamintha helms Ayu in the Wild, a women-led destination management company based in Sri Lanka and committed to curating meaningful, luxury journeys. Experienced in development finance and financial management of development projects that worked with rural communities in Sri Lanka, she brings her years of corporate experience, miles of travel into the deepest corners of the island and a deep love for impactful tourism to Ayu in the Wild’s brand of low-footfall, bespoke travel. 

Chamintha strongly believes that luxury travel must contribute towards inclusive development in Sri Lanka. Ayu in the Wild has been curating highly personalised and meticulously researched experiential trips with a positive impact since 2012. It is also Sri Lanka’s only Travel Partner of The Long Run, a community that ensures travel experiences have a positive impact, and that conservation is both socially and financially sustainable.

Speaker

Balli Jaswal

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of five novels, including the internationally bestselling Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017). She was named a Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. Jaswal’s short stories and essays have appeared in the UK Sunday Express, Cosmopolitan Magazine, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Best Australian Short Stories. A former writing fellow at the University of East Anglia, she has taught creative writing at Yale-NUS College and Nanyang Technological University, where she completed her Ph.D. in South Asian diaspora writing.

Top Titles

• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017)

• The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (2019)

• Now You See Us (2023)

Speaker

Sarah Kabir

Sarah is a researcher and author specialising in peacebuilding and reconciliation. She has a BSc in Social Policy from the University of Bristol and an MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies from the London School of Economics. She has worked on programmes connected to governance and democracy, post-war development, humanitarianism, philanthropy and remittances, amidst a range of complex cultural contexts, with diverse individuals and organisations, including rebel groups, war victims, military personnel and refugees on one hand, and the public and private sectors as well as international and local NGOs on the other. Sarah’s publication, Voices of Peace, gives insight into the circumstances, lives and choices made by ten former rebel fighters and ten Sri Lankan military personnel. 

Sarah is now leading a documentary project in collaboration with Roar Media, exploring critical moments in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history that have been largely overlooked in the mainstream or education curriculum. She also heads the Public Relations division of the Interim Secretariat for Truth and Reconciliation Mechanisms.

Top Titles

• Voices of Peace: They Were Just Like Us (2019)

Speaker

Shehan Karunatilaka

Shehan Karunatilaka emerged on to the global literary stage in 2011, when he won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC and Gratiaen Prize for his debut novel, Chinaman. The book was declared the second-best cricket book of all time by Wisden.

Born in  Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, Karunatilaka grew up in Colombo, studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He currently lives in Sri Lanka. His songs, scripts and stories have been published in Rolling Stone, GQ and National Geographic. He has worked as an advertising copywriter and played guitar in a band called Independent Square.

His second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was announced as the winner of the Booker Prize 2022 in London.

Top Titles

• Chinaman (2010)
  

• The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)

• The Birth Lottery & Other Surprises (2022)

Speaker

Radha Kumar

Radha Kumar is a former Director General of the Delhi Policy Group and a specialist on ethnic conflicts, peace and security. Previously Director of the Mandela Centre for Peace at Jamia Millia Islamia University, she developed the first MA in Peace and Conflict Studies in India. Dr Kumar has held a number of senior positions at institutions including Columbia University, the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly in Prague and the UN, where she served as chair of the United Nations University Council.

She is currently vice-chair for SIPRI and co-chair of the Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir. Her book, Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir (2018) was named “the one book to read on Kashmir” by the Telegraph India. A frequent op-ed contributor to the Hindu and the Indian Express, she has been honoured with fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC in New York, as well as the Institute for Development Studies in Bangalore.

Top Titles

• Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir (2018)

• A Gender Atlas of India (with Karthika Sudhir and Marcel Korff, Sage: 2018)

• The Republic Relearned: A Brief History of Indian Democracy in Eight Chapters (2024)

Speaker

Christina Lamb

Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times, Christina Lamb is a decorated journalist. Her honours included the Prix Bayeux, Europe’s foremost prize for war correspondents, Amnesty International’s Outstanding Impact Award, and the prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Award, given by the Society of Editors in 2022.

She is the author of ten books, including the bestselling I am Malala, co-written with Malala Yousafzai, and The Girl from Aleppo, with Nujeen Mustafa. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, about sexual violence in conflict, won the first Pilecki Institute award for war reporting. It was described by Antony Beevor as ‘the most powerful book’ he had ever read.

She is a Global Champion for UN Education Cannot Wait, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an Honorary Fellow of University College Oxford, an International Board member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, an Associate of the Imperial War Museum, and was made an OBE by the Queen in 2013.

Top Titles

• The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa (2016)

• Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: What War Does to Women (2020)

• The Prince Rupert Hotel for the Homeless (2022)

Chef

Jeremy Lee

Jeremy Lee joined the Hart brothers at Soho’s Quo Vadis in early 2012, becoming Chef Proprietor of the restaurant. Part of the resurgence of modern British cooking, he had previously manned the stoves of Blueprint Café in the Design Museum in London. Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Jeremy comes from a family where home cooking of a high order was daily fare. His parents and grandmother taught him the mysteries of finding good produce through good shopping. Jeremy applies this to the menus at Quo Vadis, where the cooking is bright, fresh and quintessentially British in a manner most modern. 

In 2012, Jeremy and Quo Vadis won the Catey for Best Restaurant Menu of the Year; in 2013 they won the Tatler Award for Best Kitchen. Jeremy was listed in The Evening Standard’s ‘Progress 1000: London’s most influential people – Tastemakers: Eat & Drink’ in 2018. He writes for numerous newspapers and has appeared on television. 

Top Titles

• Cooking: Simply and Well for One or Many (2022)

Speaker

Andrew Lownie

Andrew Lownie was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was Dunster History Prizeman and President of the Union, before taking his Masters and doctorate at Edinburgh University. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he later returned to Cambridge as a visiting fellow at Churchill College.

He has been a bookseller, publisher and journalist, writing for the Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator and Guardian, and since 1988 has run his own literary agency specialising in history and biography. He is President of the Biographers Club, sits on the board of Biographers International Organisation and is a Trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

His books include a prize-winning biography of the spy Guy Burgess and the top-ten Sunday Times bestsellers The Mountbattens and Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. His next book is on the Duke & Duchess of York.

Top Titles

• Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring (2016)

• The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves (2019)

• Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (2021)

Speaker

Isurinie Anuradha Mallawaarachchi

Isurinie Anuradha Mallawaarachchi is a lecturer, attorney-at-law and bilingual poet. Isurinie’s work touches on love, heartbreak, sex and self exploration. Her first collection of poetry, Flowers Teach Me to Let Go, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2023.

Top Titles

• Flowers Teach Me to Let Go (2022)

Speaker

Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera is the award-winning author of the novels Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us. Her debut novel was shortlisted for the DSC Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize for the Asian Region. Her second book won the Sri Lankan National Book Prize and was shortlisted for the California Book Award. She has been named one of “Twelve Women of Color Writers You Need to Know” by Bustle Magazine and “One of the Asian American Women Writers Who are Going to Change the World” by Electric Literature. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.” 

Her short fiction and non-fiction are also widely published. She has been honoured as a KQED Woman to Watch and has been written up in Vogue India. She has presented in panels and conferences around the world including at the Jaipur Literary Festival, Mumbai Literary Festival, Galle Literary Festival, Bay Area Book Festival, LitQuake and AWP. Her writing workshops for women and non-binary folks – which she calls her Writing Covens – have been called transformative and liberating by participants. 

Top Titles

• Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012)

• What Lies Between Us (2016)

Speaker

Moni Mohsin

Moni Mohsin was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. Now based in London, she is a freelance journalist and author of three novels, the prize winning The End of Innocence, Tender Hooks and The Impeccable Integrity of Ruby R. Her bestselling collection of satirical columns, The Diary of a Social Butterfly, The Return of the Butterfly and Between You, Me and the Four Walls, are based on her long running column for The Friday Times.

Top Titles

• The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008)

• The Impeccable Integrity of Ruby R. (2020)

• Between You, Me and the Four Walls (2023)

Speaker

Nujeen Mustafa

Nujeen Mustafa (Arabic: نوجين مصطفى Nūjjayn Muṣṭafā; also transliterated Noujain Mustaffa) is a Kurdish Syrian refugee and activist with cerebral palsy. She was raised in Aleppo, Syria, and gained attention after travelling 3,500 miles (5,600 km) by wheelchair, fleeing conflict in the Syrian Civil War, before arriving and resettling in Germany. She was listed as one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2018, and her story was featured on the television show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. In 2019 she became the first disabled person to brief the United Nations Security Council, and was the recipient of the Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism from Human Rights Watch.

Top Titles

The Girl from Aleppo with Christina Lamb (2016)

Speaker

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories and Seahorse: A Novel. She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her bestselling novella The Nine Chambered-Heart was published in ten languages including Italian, Spanish, French, and German.

She studied English Literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and History of Art at SOAS, London. Her work—including art reviews, book reviews, fiction and poetry—has featured in a wide selection of national publications. In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, and a Writer in Residence at the TOJI Residency in South Korea in 2019.

Her novel Everything the Light Touches won the AutHer Award for Best Fiction in 2023, and was listed in The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2022”. She lives between Shillong and New Delhi with a cat of many names.

Top Titles

• Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (2012)

• The Nine Chambered-Heart (2017)

• Everything the Light Touches (2022)

Speaker

Chalana Perera

Chalana is the founder of RETRACETM Hospitality, a Sri Lanka-based client advisory service specialising in regenerative tourism development and hospitality asset management. Chalana advises a range of private-sector and public-funded hospitality and tourism projects. 

He began his career in Europe, developing hotels for institutional investors, a private equity fund, and international brands including award-winning citizenM Hotels. A graduate of Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, Switzerland, and a certified Climate Reality Leader, Chalana was Sri Lanka’s first signatory to Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency and the Future of Tourism Coalition. 

As a member of the Hospitality of the Future Think Tank, Chalana was a contributing author to the 2023 Routledge textbook Critical Questions in Sustainability and Hospitality. He sits on the Hospitality Net World Panel on Sustainability and has addressed tourism industry fora including MIPIM (France) ITB (Germany), the Young Hoteliers Summit (Switzerland), and various audiences in Sri Lanka.

Speaker

Lahiru Perera

Co-Founder and Head of Food Operations at Smoke & Bitters, Lahiru has always been focused on creating joyful experiences for people. Along with a serious passion for food, drinks and music, this has made him a perfect fit for the hospitality business. Lahiru took the first steps towards this in 2014, founding Zephyr, which became a hugely successful chain of bar & restaurants in Sri Lanka. Now at the helm of Smoke and Bitters’ kitchen, Lahiru works with woodfire to smoke or chargrill dishes, using Sri Lankan ingredients to create unique flavours inspired by global cultures. 

Lahiru attended the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, where he developed his passion for using traditional cooking methods and forgotten skills. Learning from some of the best in the industry further empowered Lahiru to source authentic ingredients and bring Sri Lankan flavours and cooking styles to the world.

Speaker

Sam Perera

Sam Perera is Managing Partner and co-founder of the small, independent, Colombo-based press Perera Hussein Publishing House, since 2003. He lived and worked in the US and Switzerland for many years before returning to Sri Lanka to follow his dream of showcasing Sri Lankan writing in English to the world. He has published several prize-winning fiction and non-fiction books, many by first-time authors. He believes in the balance of nature and work and has spent the last eighteen years re-greening a 20 acre property in Puttalam, Sri Lanka’s semi-arid zone.

Speaker

DBC Pierre

DBC Pierre was born in 1961 in Reynella, Australia. He was brought up in Mexico and the UK, and now lives in Ireland. He previously worked as a designer and an internationally published cartoonist, but  now devotes himself to writing. His debut novel, Vernon God Little (2003) – a dark satire set in the aftermath of a Texas high school massacre – was the winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

His second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English, was published in 2006. He has since published Lights Out in Wonderland (2010); Breakfast with the Borgias (2014); as well as Petit Mal (2013), a selection of short fiction and non-fiction; and Release the Bats (2016), which explores the art and process of storytelling, amongst other novels.

 Top Titles

• Vernon God Little (2003)

• Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020)

• Big Snake Little Snake: An Inquiry into Risk (2022)

Speaker

Sumith Pilapitiya

Sumith Pilapitiya undertook his university education in the US, where he obtained his Ph.D in Environmental Sciences from Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was a Lead Environmental Specialist for the South Asia Environment and Natural Resources Unit of the World Bank, working on environmental and wildlife conservation projects in South and East Asia as well as in Africa. He was also the Director General of Sri Lanka’s Department of Wildlife Conservation for a brief period. 

Sumith is South Asia’s representative on the Technical Advisory Group of the Monitoring of the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) programme and a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group. He is presently the Chairman of the Presidential Committee appointed to “facilitate, oversee and monitor” the implementation of the National Action Plan for Human Elephant Conflict Mitigation. His personal research interests centre upon elephant conservation and he is involved in interpreting the visual and tactile communications of elephants.

Speaker

Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa

Vidura BR is a Sri Lankan comedian, writer, and director based in London, via Malaysia and Berlin. His dead-pan style puts audiences at ease while challenging conventional wisdom with a unique tone that is often irreverent, at times poignant, and always hysterical.

His self directed, produced, written, and performed debut show Monsoon Season garnered much online attention and critical acclaim, and was selected for syndication on Amazon Prime Video following its initial release. He is currently touring his new hour show French Kiss Tunnel across multiple countries through 2024.

Speaker

Anya Ratnayaka

Anya is a PhD Candidate at The University of Queensland, with a strong interest in Sri Lankan wildlife and the conservation of urban mesocarnivores. She founded the Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project in 2013, and co-founded the non-profit Small Cat Advocacy & Research in 2017. She studies the ecology and behaviour of the world’s only known hyper-urban population of fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus), found in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Anya and her team work closely with the Department of Wildlife Conservation, the Sri Lanka Land Development Corporation, and the Urban Development Authority to understand how to better protect fishing cats and their urban habitats.

Anya is also a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission: Cat Specialist Group, a Wildlife Conservation Network Scholar, a Re:wild Associate Scientist, and a member of the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance – a collective of experts working on the species across its global range in South and Southeast Asia.

Speaker

Chiranthi Rajapakse

Chiranthi Rajapakse’s second collection of short stories, Keeping Time and Other Stories was selected as joint winner of the 2022 (30th) Gratiaen Prize. Her first book, Names and Numbers, was also shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2017. Her writing has been published by New Ceylon Writing, City (a quarterly journal of South Asian literature), Wachana, Samyuktha Fiction and Fairlight Shorts. Chiranthi has degrees in Law and Dentistry and has worked as a journalist, lecturer, feature writer and legal researcher. She now works as a research manager with LIRNEasia.

Top Titles

• Names and Numbers (2017)

• Keeping Time and Other Stories (2022)

Speaker

Marguerite Richards

Marguerite Richards is an American writer and book editor, focusing on memoir and diverse voices. She holds degrees in literature and translation, has taught in France and Chile, and fell in love with magazine publishing in New York. Her articles and essays have been published in various places, but she has found her calling with books. She lives in Sri Lanka with her husband and two sons. 

Her book, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human, is a collection of personal stories by people you wouldn’t ordinarily get to meet, living all over the world. The book was originally published by Penguin SEA in 2019, and an updated second edition is due to be released in early 2024. 

Top Titles

• The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human (2019)

Speaker

Simon Schama

Sir Simon Schama’s award-winning books, which have been translated into twenty-three languages, include The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt’s Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews. His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times, where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented more than fifty films for the BBC on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy and American politics, and he co-presented the landmark series on the history of world art, Civilisations. Most recently, his History of Now series aired on BBC2 in November–December 2022. Schama lives in New York and is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations is his twentieth book.

Top Titles

•  Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

• The Power of Art (2006)

• Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (2023)

Speaker

Randhula de Silva

Randhula de Silva is the Founder and CEO of GoodLife X Pvt Ltd, a catalyst for environmentally and socially conscious entrepreneurs and innovators in Sri Lanka. She is an Independent Director of Trace Expert City and a Council Member of the National Innovation Agency. She advocates for social transformation through culture and creativity, as a co-founder of Radical Center, True Patriot movement, and executive producer of Sri Lankan feature films, protest music and adult novellas. 

She is a Chevening Research, Innovation, Science, and Leadership Fellow of the University of Oxford and was awarded as the ‘Game Changer of the Year’ at the Women in Management – Sri Lanka (WIM) top 50 Professional and Career awards in 2021. Previously she was the CEO of Hatch Works, Chief Disrupter at GIZ Sri Lanka, and Head of Information Intelligence at Verite Research. Randhula holds a Masters in Regional and Development Planning and a BBA in Business Economics from the University of Colombo.

Speaker

Sujit Sivasundaram

Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His recent book Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire won the British Academy Book Prize and was co-winner of the Jerry Bentley Book Prize for World History. It was described as “a riot of ingenuity; a truly powerful and new history of revolutions and empires.” He is also author of Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony, which was reviewed as a “seminal” book on the history of Sri Lanka: “it questions received wisdom, entrenched narratives and the way we think about our country and ourselves.” Sujit sits on the editorial boards of major research journals in history and was recently elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Top Titles

• Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (2005)

• Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013)

• Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2020)

Chef

Cynthia Shanmugalingam

Cynthia Shanmugalingam is a British-Sri Lankan Tamil cook who was born in England, visiting Sri Lanka in her childhood holidays and eating dishes adapted by her immigrant family at home. She is the author of Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka (Bloomsbury UK, 2022), which won the Fortnum and Mason’s Best Debut Cookery Book 2023, was named as a best cookbook of the year by the New York Times, LA Times, Chrissy Teigen, and Bon Appetit. She is the chef-proprietor of the restaurant Rambutan, which opened in 2023 and was hailed as “dazzling” by the Financial Times, British Vogue and London’s Evening Standard. Her cooking has a special focus on Jaffna where her family comes from, and has been featured in The Guardian, the BBC, The Times and We Present.

Top Titles

• Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka (2022)

Speaker

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith CBE was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh before he became a full-time author. His various series of books have been translated into over 46 languages and have sold more than 30 million copies across the world. These include The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, and the 44 Scotland Street and Isabel Dalhousie novels, both set in Edinburgh. Alexander is the co-founder of an amateur orchestra called ‘The Really Terrible Orchestra’, in which he plays the bassoon.

Top Titles

• A song of Comfortable Chairs (2022) – the latest in the The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series

• The Sweet Remnants of Summer (2022) – the latest in the Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries series

• The Enigma of Garlic (2023) – the latest in the 44 Scotland Street series

Speaker

Yanik Tissera

Yanik is a wildlife and conservation photographer based in Sri Lanka. Having developed a keen interest in the natural world from a young age, he later trained in photojournalism and portraiture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia. Yanik’s work has evolved over the years, and he is now a specialist in conservation story-telling, blending his love of photography, wildlife and preservation of the natural world. He divides his time between the eastern and southern coasts of the island, where he operates seasonal businesses.

Yanik co-heads the Parrotfish Collective, a group of conservation communicators producing mixed-media educational materials to inspire a love of nature among both children and adults. Yanik is driven by his desire to ensure that Sri Lanka’s natural world remains protected for future generations and his team has been instrumental in raising awareness of the importance of conservation efforts. His work is characterised by a deep understanding of nature, with an artistic eye that captures the beauty of the island’s wildlife.

Speaker

Chhimi Tenduf-La

Chhimi Tenduf-La is the author of 3 novels, The Amazing Racist, Panther and Loyal Stalkers. He is based in Sri Lanka, where he has lived, on and off, for much of his life. His fourth book, a psychological thriller, may come out soon.

Top Titles

• The Amazing Racist (2015)

• Panther (2015)

• Loyal Stalkers (2017)

Speaker

Irushi Tennekoon

Irushi is a Colomb0-based artist and animator, adding to a global discourse on storytelling through animation by highlighting everyday stories from Sri Lanka and South Asia. She is best known for her award-winning series of films, Animate Her (2019-2022), based on the lives of seven exceptional Sri Lankan women. Irushi taught undergraduate English for almost a decade before pursuing her studio-based creative practice full time. She recently completed her Master’s in Animation at the Royal College of Art in London, as a Chevening Scholar. 

Irushi has received three Best Animated Short Film awards and two Green Awards at the annual Agenda14 Short Film Festival in Colombo. Her short film, Thaji Dias on Traditional Dance, received the Best National Short Film award at the 2022 Jaffna International Cinema Festival. Her films have been screened widely, including at the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, the MMCA in Colombo, the Tricky Women International Animation Festival in Vienna, and the Brighton International Animation Festival. 

Top Titles

• ’83 – A Very Short Film(2016)

• Animate Her (2019-22 – short film series)

• Dancing in the Void(2023)

Speaker

Jagath Weerasinghe

Jagath Weerasinghe, born in 1954, is a Sri Lankan contemporary artist and archaeologist. A significant driving force in the development of Sri Lankan art since the early 1990s, he is presently the Emeritus Professor of the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in Painting from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Kelaniya, and later a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the American University, Washington, D.C in 1991. Jagath was also the 2017 recipient of the Arts & Literary Arts Resident Fellowship at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation. He famously coined the phrase ‘90s Art Trend’, recognising the need for a framework to describe the work of fellow Sri Lankan artists at the time. This concept has, in turn, acted as a catalyst for theoretical studies into the politically conscious contemporary art of 1990s Sri Lanka. 

Speaker

Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne

Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne has broken internationally significant wildlife stories, including recognising Sri Lanka as the best place in the world for seeing blue whales, the site of the world’s largest recurring gathering of wild elephants and a key destination for leopard safaris. 

 Gehan’s efforts have made him a wildlife celebrity in Sri Lanka, with over 25 published books and 400 articles. He is amongst a handful of field naturalists to write and photograph internationally-published books and field guides spanning terrestrial mammals, marine mammals, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, wild flowers and trees. 

In the words of British wildlife presenter Bill Oddie, no single individual has done so much to raise the profile of a country for its wildlife. Gehan is the Chair of the London Bird Club and a Trustee of the British Ornithologists’ Club. Back in London after ten years in Sri Lanka, he continues to promote the island as one of the world’s best all-round wildlife destinations.

Top Titles

• Wild Sri Lanka (2013)

• A Photographic Field Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka (2017)

• A Naturalist’s Guide to the Trees of Sri Lanka (2020)

Speaker

Anoma Wijewardene

Anoma has exhibited internationally with solo shows in London, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Dubai and New Delhi. She represented South Asia at Sotheby’s Hong Kong exhibition of women artists of the silk route and is the first solo Sri Lankan artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. An alumna of Central Saint Martins London, Anoma has been a visiting lecturer at CSM and several UK art colleges. Her early design work had a global clientele, including Chanel, Ralph Lauren and Yves St Laurent, and was on the cover of British Vogue. Anoma’s current artwork spans painting, mixed media, sculpture, video and performance. She often collaborates with poets, writers, scientists, composers and political advisors to create multimedia installations on the environment and unity.

The monograph Anoma is the definitive book on the artist Anoma Wijewardene’s oeuvre and contains insightful essays from critics and intellectuals, with each writer positing a very different perspective. Inclusive of 200 illustrations of the paintings, it affords a fascinating exploration of the creative process and an artist’s journey. The art encapsulates Anoma’s passion for sustainability and regeneration, inclusion and co-existence. 

Top Titles

•  ANOMA (2019)

Speaker

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, data scientist and general tinkerer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Watchdog, a research collective that works on fact checking, investigative journalism and community tech. 

His fiction includes novels like Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race, The Wretched and the Damned, and The Salvage Crew. His stories have won the Gratiaen award, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, appeared in venues like Wired, ForeignPolicy and Slate, and been Washington Post and Audible bestsellers. He has, somewhat unfortunately, also shown up on Forbes‘ 30 Under 30. He has several cats who care about none of these things, and spends most of his time on his homestead in Kandy, learning the care and feeding of potato plants.

Top Titles

•  Numbercaste (2017)

• The Salvage Crew (2020)

• The Wretched and the Damned (to be published)