Jaffna Monitor - Jaffna Monitor

One library that began a story

By: Shankari Chandran Editor's Note: As Australian High Commissioner Matthew Duckworth presents the complete collection of Shankari Chandran's novels to the Jaffna Public Library today, Jaffna Monitor republishes this essay by the Miles Franklin Award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil author, who reflects on the burning of the library, its enduring place in Tamil memory, and the lasting power of stories against erasure. My footsteps slow when I pass a library. Any library. I am pulled inwards, to i

Guest Column JULY 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 14, 2026 — 5 min read

Sri Lanka Knows How to Fight Dengue. So Why Is the Government Still Losing?

COLOMBO / JAFFNA — On 6 July, the University of Moratuwa, one of the country's foremost engineering schools, sent its students home and moved teaching online for two weeks, after a cluster of more than fifty dengue infections spread through a campus where examinations were still underway. Several of those students, the university acknowledged, had sat their papers while feverish. It was the third campus disrupted in a matter of weeks. The University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo h

JM Exclusive JULY 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 13, 2026 — 6 min read

Nishan Canagarajah, Jaffna-Born Scholar, Is Knighted at Windsor Castle

More than four decades after he left a war-shadowed Jaffna on a scholarship, Professor Nishan Canagarajah knelt before King Charles III at Windsor Castle on Tuesday and rose a knight. During the investiture ceremony in Berkshire, the British monarch touched the shoulders of the kneeling academic with a sword to formally confer the honour of Knight Bachelor. Sir Nishan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, was named in the 2026 King's New Year Honors for his "inestimable contribution

JULY 2026 Monitor Memo

Jaffna Monitor

Jul 8, 2026 — 3 min read

A Sri Lankan President Acknowledges Security Forces' Crimes — but Only Some

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — For decades, allegations that Sri Lanka's security forces were implicated in murder, abduction, and torture were, in the country's mainstream politics, largely dismissed as a Tamil grievance. Raised by victims in the north and east and by the families of the disappeared, they found little sympathy within the Sinhala-majority political establishment that has governed the country since independence. This week, the man who now leads that establishment — and serves as commander

June 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jun 27, 2026 — 3 min read

‘Why Have a Justice Minister Without Justice?’ Protesters Confront Minister at Chemmani

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Relatives of people who disappeared during Sri Lanka’s civil war staged a protest on Friday outside the Chemmani mass grave site, demanding an international investigation and rejecting what they described as inadequate domestic efforts to uncover the truth. The demonstration coincided with a visit by Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara and officials from the Office on Missing Persons to the excavation site at the Siththupathi Hindu cemetery in Jaffna, where forensic teams

June 2026 Monitor Memo

Jaffna Monitor

Jun 19, 2026 — 1 min read

The Meccan Shawl: S.L.M. Hanifa’s Stories Reach the World as Jaffna Monitor Enters Publishing

After more than six decades of writing about life in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, S.L.M. Hanifa’s stories are reaching an English-speaking audience around the world. The Meccan Shawl, a collection of fifteen of his short stories translated from Tamil into English, will be launched on Sunday, June 14, at 4:00 p.m. at the Olympic Auditorium Hall on Independence Avenue in Colombo 7. The book is jointly published by Jaffna Monitor and Ghazal Publications. For Jaffna Monitor, it marks a new ventur

June 2026 Monitor Memo

Jaffna Monitor

Jun 13, 2026 — 2 min read

THE EASTER SUNDAY FILES Part One: What the FBI Found

Colombo — More than seven years after eight suicide bombers tore through three churches and three hotels, killing more than 260 people, Sri Lanka is still arguing about what really happened on Easter Sunday. The country’s search for answers has produced thousands of pages of testimony, evidence, and analysis spread across seven major investigations. Yet those inquiries did not always pursue the same questions, nor did they always reach the same conclusions. The debate has now burst back into p

JM Exclusive June 2026

Jaffna Monitor

Jun 9, 2026 — 9 min read

Deepthi Attygalle, Pioneer of Sri Lankan Anaesthesia, Dies at 86

Deepthi Attygalle, the Sri Lankan anaesthesiologist whose work on magnesium sulphate became an important reference point in the treatment of severe tetanus, died on June 1, 2026. She was 86. For much of the twentieth century, severe tetanus was managed by heavily sedating patients and supporting them on mechanical ventilators for weeks at a time, a regimen that consumed intensive-care resources often unavailable in many developing countries. At the General Hospital in Colombo, Dr. Attygalle and

May 2026 Obituary

Jaffna Monitor

Jun 3, 2026 — 3 min read