Vivimarie VanderPoorten is a Sri Lankan poet writing in English, whose first book Nothing Prepares You won the 2007 Gratiaen Award. She is a university lecturer and has a PhD in Educational Sociolinguistics from the University of Ulster, UK. She has published two award-winning volumes of poetry. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Sinhalese, Nepalese and Tamil and has been published in various anthologies and journals (online and in print). She has just begun to translate from Sinhala to English.