Sharika Thiranagana was born in Sri Lanka and left at the age of ten as a refugee. She wrote her first poem as a child, when she was about to leave Sri Lanka. This sense of loss and the necessity of renewal has haunted her writing. She is now an anthropologist who has done research with displaced Tamils and Muslims from the north of Sri Lanka. Her publications are primarily academic and look at memory, kinship, political violence, and the future for different generations of minority Sri Lankans.