I Exist. Therefore I Am

• Winner - 2019 State Literary Award
• Shortlisted - 2019 Rubery Book Awards

A newly married woman burns to death. A mother is forced to kill her infant daughter. A young woman with a promising future becomes a slave to a holy man. A recently widowed woman is left on the bank of a river to die. I Exist. Therefore I Am takes you on a journey into the world of women and the trauma they face for simply being.Moving yet also disturbing, these nine stories set in India are about internal struggles, desperation, vulnerability as well as yearning for something better. It is about secrets, words that cannot be spoken, social restrictions and smiles that don’t quite reach the eyes.In story after story, Rajapakse portrays the terrible treatment towards women as a result of religious, cultural and tribal taboos placed on them, and the suffering at the hands not just of society but of their own kind.This is fiction that is created for readers that aren’t afraid to question society and its beliefs and tear open the wounds to heal the soul.They describe what it means to be women, the helplessness they are confronted with and the unending hope they have for a better future. Will these women’s sacrifices make a difference or will they have been in vain?

Shirani Rajapakse is an internationally published, award winning poet and short story writer. She won the Cha "Betrayal" Poetry Contest 2013 and was a finalist in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards 2013. Her debut collection of short stories "Breaking News" (Vijitha Yapa 2011) was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Award. Her critically acclaimed poetry collection "Chant of a Million Women" (self-published 2017) won the 2018 Kindle Book Awards. It received an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Readers' Favorite Awards and was chosen as an Official Selection in the 2018 New Apple Summer eBook Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. Rajapakse's work appears in many literary journals and anthologies around the world. Rajapakse read for a BA in English Literature from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka and has a MA in International Relations from JNU, India.