Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge

Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge

Asia, Sri Lanka, 2011

Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge is a lawyer and an investigative reporter and editor from Sri Lanka. She worked at the Sunday Leader newspaper with her husband, Lasantha Wickrematunge, for more than a decade before fleeing Sri Lanka shortly after he was killed in 2009, due to threats to her own life. Her work in covering human rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press has been widely recognized. In 2008 she was awarded the Global Shining Light Award for Investigative Journalism by the Global Investigative Journalism Conference and, in 2009, Pen International awarded her the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression. She was a 2010 Neiman Fellow at Harvard University. Her husband, who was slain two months after their marriage, was awarded the 2009 UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize posthumously.