Harbour Lights

Gunawardena has a poetic voice that is always a quiet and thoughtful one

A recording of brief and witty, carefully crafted impressions of life as she lived it. Here is a collection of poems that reveal a country loved and known.

'The limpid simplicity of her language reveals nuanced complexities of response and judgement that actively engage the reader's mind and emotions when the writer presents the interplay of cultures or personalities, or of the past, recent past and the present. She depicts herself as an unobtrusive observer "I love to watch through glass". She is also so acute and honest that her poems can evoke disturbing echoes' – Lakshmi de Silva

'The pull of her Motherland is clearly seen, yet without cloying sentimentality or paeans of praise to its scenic beauty' – Anne Abeysekera

Yvonne Gunawardena studied music in London on a government scholarship in the early fifties and taught in Sri Lanka for many years. She received a BA (Hons) degree in the Humanities from the Open University in Britain in 1988. She has spent time in New Delhi and Geneva returning to live in London since 1973. However, despite the many years in foreign lands, Sri Lanka has remained close to her heart, as reflected in her many poems on the themes of exile and cultural dissonance.