It could have been a setting straight from one of her books- the mellow glow of the Governor’s Residence at night on its hillside perch in Galle, a garden party on the lawn; except it’s in the cool of a tropical evening. It’s not difficult to spot Joanna Trollope in the crowd. Tall and willowy, impeccably attired in a diaphanous sea-green kurta, she has an effortless grace, an ease of manner that sees her turn to perfect strangers with smiling interest. Grace enough to consent to slip away to the back of the house even while the Galle Literary Festival launch party is lighting up and sit in a kitchen corridor, unfazed by insects whirring around (it’s that time of evening) so that interview deadlines can be met.
But then she understands deadlines. 2012 is a year full of them for this best-selling British novelist whose stories of fraught relationships and the complexities of contemporary life have won warm acclaim from readers, women in particular. She’s chairman of the Orange Prize for Fiction – the prestigious international women’s writers’ award that has brought in the likes of Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi and she’s also on the panel of the UK Sunday Times AFG Short Story prize in the very literary company of Melvyn Bragg, Hanif Kureishi and Edna O’Brien.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry from your site By Viresh Fernando By trying to be all things to all people the Galle Literary Festival 
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There never was a meeting held on the Galle Face Green at that time by the Marxists elements of this country in which what they called the 'Beira-gedera' 
Kumarasinghe intends to run in the April 8 polls from Galle, under the UPFA ticket. In fact, she has already set up a Facebook page, “People's Campaign for