There are too many books one might pick up to mark National Poetry Day this year, with its theme of Refuge. My recommendation is one of the most important anthologies to have appeared recently: Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas. It’s a huge achievement by its three editors - Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett - who have placed 400 pages of poetry into an enormous gap in Anglophone literary culture. - Jeremy Noel-Tod, Some Flowers Soon

There are angry waves crashing throughout this collection, the reverberations of colonialism and imperialism, swelled into a civil war, factions and the demonising of Muslim communities, yet amid all of this, each poem is a silent dewdrop shining on the Sri Lankan diaspora. A compilation of jasmine in full bloom and honey birds by day. - Roy McFarlane, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2023

Out of Sri Lanka’s post-1948 verse defies Anglo-American marginalisations of ‘world poetry’ and demands we encounter this rich body of work as poetry without qualifying adjectives. - Orla Polten, New Internationalist

This expansive and exciting anthology is edited by Shash Trevett, Seni Seneviratne and Vidyan Ravinthiran … and includes poems by new poets alongside older work, some of which was previously out of print. - Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North, New Writing North

VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The
Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize and Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. After posts at Cambridge, Durham
and Birmingham, he now teaches at Harvard.

SENI SENEVIRATNE, a writer of English and Sri Lankan heritage published by Peepal Tree Press, with books including Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), and Unknown Soldier (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a National
Poetry Day Choice and highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes 2020. She is currently working on an LGBTQ project with Sheffield Museums entitled Queering the Archive and completing her fourth collection to be
published by Peepal Tree in 2023. She lives in Derbyshire.

SHASH TREVETT is a Tamil from Sri Lanka who came to the UK to escape the civil war. She is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in 2021 by Smith|Doorstop.
Shash has been on judging panels for the PEN Translates awards and the London Book Fair, and was a Visible Communities Translator in Residence at the National Centre for Writing. Shash is a Ledbury Critic, reviewing for PN Review and the Poetry Book Society and is a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. She lives in York.