Sonali Deraniyagala

Economist, memoirist, and researcher Sonali Deraniyagala was born in 1964 in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. Her father was a well-respected lawyer, and her mother was a talented home cook. Deraniyagala left Sri Lanka for the first time at age 18 to study economics at Cambridge University. She went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Deraniyagala met her husband and fellow economist, Stephen Lissenburgh, while at Cambridge. Following their graduate studies, the couple went on to work as research scholars in economics. They had two children together and lived between Sri Lanka and the U.K. While living in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the couple worked together for a time on educational projects for underserved communities. Deraniyagala was vacationing with her family at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka in December 2004 when the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami hit. The natural disaster resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. Deraniyagala survived the disaster, but Steve Lissenburgh, the couple’s children, and Deraniyagala’s parents all perished. Deraniyagala struggled in the wake of her loss, and for a time she contemplated suicide. She relocated to New York in 2006 to work as a research scholar at Columbia University, during which time she began to write about her past trauma at the suggestion of her therapist. What began as an exercise in processing her grief culminated in the publication of Wave in 2013. The memoir received praise from critics and was a finalist in the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography. After Wave’s publication, Deraniyagala met Irish actress Fiona Shaw, an admirer of  the book, and they began dating. Deraniyagala later proposed to Shaw, and the couple married in 2018. They live in New York and London.