This is a Sinhala-language book, printed in Sinhala script throughout, and a reader will need Sinhala to use it. Buyers outside Sri Lanka should know that before ordering: there is no English text here.
Waga Thuga was the name Chandraratne Manawasinghe gave to a column he began writing in the newspaper Lankadeepa, and the title carried on this volume is that of the column. Manawasinghe was a scholar, poet and journalist from Puwakdandawa in the Southern Province. He was twice ordained as a Buddhist monk, and he studied Bengali and Hindi in India. His writing life ran through several of the Sinhala papers and journals of his time: he contributed to Lakmini Pahana, which Kumaratunga Munidasa edited, and he sat on the editorial board of Heladiva. He was among those involved in starting Lankadeepa, and he worked at the paper until the end of his life.
The column gave him a regular platform for comment on Sinhala letters and the cultural arguments of the day. One instance that is still remembered is his use of the column to praise Ediriweera Sarachchandra's play Maname, written shortly after the play first reached the stage. Manawasinghe is also known as a lyricist, among his songs "Kusum Pipi Athu Pathare".
The book is published by Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo house that publishes in Sinhala and English and keeps a long list of Sinhala literary and scholarly titles in print. It will interest readers following Manawasinghe's prose, students of twentieth-century Sinhala journalism, and anyone building a shelf of the critics and columnists who shaped Sinhala literary debate in the newspaper era.
- Author: Sri Chandrarathna Manawasinghe
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 232
- ISBN: 9789553073389
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