SENI SENEVIRATNE
Renaissance One presents UNKNOWN SOLDIER

A moving one-woman performance and multi-media installation which brings to life the hidden family narrative of poet-artist Seni Seneviratne and her father’s experiences as a Royal Signalman in the North African Desert War.  

At the heart of the story is a photo-album, the only surviving record of a friendship between two signalmen: one Seni’s father, a young man from colonial Ceylon, the other an unknown photographer. It explores her father’s return from the war, his marriage to a Yorkshire woman and family life in Leeds. 

The show is based on the poetry collection Unknown Soldier (Peepal Tree, 2019) by Seneviratne and forms part of the Unknown Soldier Tour 2023. It has been created with direction consultancy by Amanda Huxtable, filming and editing by Gavin Repton, image and sound design by James Waring, curation support by Melanie Abrahams, film and voice recordings by Rav Sanghera and Simon Marshall and production by Renaissance One. Funded by Arts Council England. 

Seni Seneviratne is a writer and an artist of English and Sri Lankan heritage who collaborates with film-makers, visual artists and musicians. Her poetry is featured in the AQA GCSE exam syllabus and she is published in anthologies and magazines, recently 100 Queer Poems (Penguin) and New England Review.  She recently co-edited Out of Sri Lanka, a newly published Bloodaxe anthology of Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry and she is working on an LGBTQ project with Sheffield Museums entitled Queering the Archive and her fourth collection, The Go-Away Bird was published in late 2023

“This is poetry that opens up history’s reticence and quietude, that gives words to image in deep and loving ways and holds fast to family when family has passed but is never forgotten.”  Chris Searle, Race & Class,