What Lies Between Us (Munaweera) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California (UCAL), Irving; M.A., UCAL, Riverside
• Awards—Commonwealth Book Prize (Asian Region)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area


Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of two novels. Her 2012 debut Island of a Thousand Mirrors won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013 and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. In 2016 she released her second novel What Lies Between Us.

Nayomi Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but her family left to escape the ravages of the civil war. They went first to Nigeria then eventually settled in Los Angeles, California, where Munaweera spent her teenage years. She holds Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master's degree in South Asian Literature from the University of California, Riverside.

Novels
Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera's debut novel, was published in South Asia in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2014. It tells the story of the conflict between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka from the perspective of two girls who witness the horror of the civil war. The war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.

What Lies Between Us is the story of a young Sri Lankan teenager who outwardly has taken up the mantel of American adolescence. Underneath, however, she struggles to reconcile her life in the U.S. with her traumatic past. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/52016.)