The contribution of the prize to Sri Lanka’s creative world in mind, I feel that it is high time that this policy is revised. In 29 years, any given appointed judge (1993-2021) has not presided over the prize to exceed a covetous single occasion. This single shot has been rigorously implemented as a comprehensive in-house policy in the selection of judging panels. As the prize has grown in stature, reach and its dominance over the prize tables in Sri Lankan creative writing, it has also firmly held on to the motto “One Shot”. The Gratiaen Prize is now almost 30 years old. If at all, it will be a shame if Seneviratne is invited next year to judge the prize. If history, at all, teaches us a lesson, all eyes should be on next year’s Gratiaen Prize and how Malinda Seneviratne features in it. The following year, having previously been featured in four finals, he won the Gratiaen Prize with the collection Edges. Not soon after his days translating Sekara’s Prabuddha, Seneviratne won the HAI Goonetileke prize in 2012 for a translation of Simon Nawagattegama’s Sansaranyaye Dadayakkaraya (as The Hunter in the Wilderness of Sansara). At a time, I readily used excerpts of Seneviratne’s translations of Mahagama Sekara to teach the difference between sworn translators translating literary work and translation as the transfer of culture and idiom. The volume of Seneviratne’s original composition and his translated work – in both their intensity and the newness – is staggering, to say the least. The reason for this under-recognition cannot solely be his not being a sworn translator. Like most good literary translators around, Malinda Seneviratne has remained an under-rated presence in the literary metropolis. However, having taken up the translation of Senkottan – a powerful novel if not for its rather hurried ending – Seneviratne has offered literary enthusiasts with a delectable promise. While the Gratiaen Prize proper evolved over four months and – like a butterfly – came through three phases that included a longlist of seven, a shortlist of five, and a finale, the “translation prize” came to public notice more as an abrupt late arrival to the party. Malinda Seneviratne’s translation of Mahinda Prasad Masimbula’s Senkottan as The Indelible, which was awarded the HAI Goonetileke award for the best translated work, did not receive the same media attention the works shortlisted for the Gratiaen prize did, until the last leg of the extravaganza. The book has now joined an Elite bandwagon of celebrated books of which Carl Muller’s The Jam Fruit Tree and Lalitha Withanachchi’s The Wind Blows over the Hills were the original laureates and, over the past three decades, includes the work of many game-changers in Sri Lankan writing. Since its launch a few months ago – and since being longlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in March 2021 – Crossmatch has courted increasing reader interest. Mahendran Thiruvarangan, the literary scholar from the University of Jaffna, of which Ashok Ferrey and Victoria Walker were members. Miranda’s Crossmatch, a thriller set in the dark corridors and nooks of Colombo’s medical world, was adjudged the best work by a residential Sri Lankan writer by a panel headed by Dr. Īnnounced over the weekend, the Gratiaen Prize for 2020 ended up being the night of Carmel Miranda and Malinda Seneviratne.
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