Sri Lankan-born Neela Liyanagedera has worked as a freelance writer and journalist in Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom and Australia. Prior to leaving Sri Lanka in the 1970s, Liyanagedera had also gained local fame as a film actress and been a programme producer at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation.
Writing fiction for more than twenty-five years, Liyanagedera spent a considerable period of her life in Sri Lanka's North Central Province, a region where the 'complexities' of 'ancient customs and traditions' influence the lives of the people. The experience of this area has been reflected in Liyanagedera's early writing which conveys a 'deep sensitivity' to the 'vibrant social structure' of Sri Lanka. Now Canberra-based, Liyanagedera's more recent work draws poignantly, and with humour, on contemporary society in Australia and Sri Lanka. Many of these stories are concerned with the interface between multiculturalism and a variety of social issues such as the difficulties experienced by migrants when attempting to integrate into the foreign culture of a new country.
Liyanagedera has published two selected works of short stories, Strands of Serendipity : A Collection of Short Stories (1996) and Footprints on Quicksand : Waddilove's Daughter and Other Stories (2004). Her short stories and poems have also been anthologised both in Australia and overseas.
Liyanagedera writes under the pseudonym of Frances Isaac as a tribute to her parents; the pen-name combines both her mother's and father's christian names.
