Sunil Govinnage is our final Elder-in-residence!
April 11, 2022
We are delighted to announce that Sunil Govinnage will be our final elder-in-residence.
Sunil Govinnage has published seven collections of poetry. Sunil’s work includes the short story collection Black Swans and Other Stories (2002) and his debut novel The Black Australian (published 2012 and nominated as a finalist in the Government of Sri Lanka’s State Literary Awards in 2013). His English poetry collection titled Perth: My Village Down Under won a publisher’s award in Sri Lanka in 2012. His Sinhala poetry collection Mathaka Mawatha (Passage of memory) won the best poetry collection in 2010.
AusLit database has listed over one hundred of his works and his poems have been read in Australia, Canada, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and published in Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the UK, and the USA.
Dr Sunil Govinnage (PhD) is a bilingual poet and writer. Born in Sri Lanka in 1950, Sunil migrated to Boorloo (Perth) with his family in 1988. He has been writing poetry in Sinhala since 1965 and in English since 1989, with work exploring the core themes of diasporic identity and belonging. He has worked as a full-time civil servant in Western Australia from 1988 to 2014. He also worked as a visiting lecturer teaching sociology and social justice from 2005 to 2008 at the Notre Dame University, Fremantle.
Sunil will take up his residency at Centre for Stories in May and will be working on a number of projects. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook to keep up with what Sunil will be working on during his residency at Centre for Stories.
Over the past few months of 2022, we’ve been able to host three Elders-in-residence at Centre for Stories. Our Elder-in-residence program has been made possible through donations from our Community Fund donors.
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