Anne Ranasinghe’s last journey today

The funeral of renowned author and poetess Anne Ranasinghe will be held today at 5.00 p.m. at the General Cemetery, Kanatte. The cortege will leave her residence at No. 82, Rosmead Place, Colombo 7. The cremation will take place at 5.00 p.m.

Ranasinghe passed away at her residence in Colombo on Saturday.

Born in 1925 as Anneliese Katz in Essen to a Jewish family in Germany, she escaped the Holocaust and migrated to England. 

In 1956 Ranasinghe became a citizen of Sri Lanka following her marriage to a Sri Lankan professor D.A. Ranasinghe. Her writing was largely influenced by her experience during the Second World War. She constantly drew parallels between the Holocaust and the July 83 Pogrom in Sri Lanka. 

Her first anthology of poems ‘And the Sun That Sucks The Earth to Dry’, was published in 1971. Although primarily a poet, she also wrote short stories, essays and translations.

Her works have been broadcast on radio, published in 17 countries and translated into nine languages.

Ranasinghe has won numerous local and international awards for her writing including the Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for Poetry 1985 and 1992 and non-fiction in 1987. In 1994, she won the Sri Lanka Literary Award for the best collection of short stories.

She is a founding member of the English Writers’ Cooperative of Sri Lanka and is a regular editor of its journal, Channels.

Her name has been included in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (Oxford & New York: Oxford, 1994).