In this week’s DIVA Dating Digest, we learn all about the Killing Eve star’s wife
BY YASMIN VINCE, IMAGE BY BBC AND GOODGRIEFFEST
Fiona Shaw has had quite the career, from Shakespeare to Star Wars spin-offs. The Irish actress has spent decades on our stages and screens. Meanwhile, in the world of non-fiction books, her wife is also a well-known name.
Who is Sonali Deraniyagala? Join us as we learn more about the memoirist…
She’s an Oxbridge grad
Sonali has not one but two degrees from the Oxbridge set! She has a degree in economics from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
The economist is linked to two other universities as she is a faculty member at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a research scholar at Columbia University in New York.
Because of the work commitments of both partners, Sonali and Fiona split their time between London and New York. They also regularly visit each other’s home countries of Sri Lanka and Ireland.
She survived a tsunami
In 2004, Sonali and her husband, Steve Lissenburgh, decided to take their two children to Sri Lanka to spend the holidays with her parents. The entire family were staying at a hotel in Yala National Park when the Boxing Day tsunami hit.
Sonali was rescued and taken to her aunt’s house in Colombo, but her family was missing. In the first week of January, the bodies of her parents and one of her sons were identified. Her other child and husband were not found until four months later, when a lab in Austria discovered their DNA in two bodies exhumed from a mass grave.
Sonali fell into a deep depression. She started relying on alcohol and attempted suicide. Eventually, she was set up with a therapist who helped her cope with her grief and trauma.
She’s written a bestselling memoir
Sonali’s therapist advised her to begin writing to sort through her memories and trauma. In 2013, nine years after the tsunami, these notes became her memoir Wave.
The book was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN Ackerley Prize. It was also named by the New York Times as one of the Top 10 books of 2013. In an amazing moment for Sonali, two of her literary heroes provided words of praise for the cover. Joan Didion said it was “an amazing, beautiful book”, which Michael Ondaatje said it was “the most powerful and haunting book I have read in years”.
Sonali and Fiona started dating in 2018
And they were married the same year! The pair first met after being introduced by friends, at the request of Fiona, who had read Wave and wanted to meet the author.
While Sonali had been married before, Fiona hadn’t. She told Saga magazine she was glad to have been an older bride. She said: “I don’t think I could have married when I was in my twenties or thirties; I don’t think I was that person.”
Speaking on her wife’s tragedy, Fiona told Good Housekeeping: “Its sorrow doesn’t dominate our life, but it definitely defines it. I understand the value of things by being with Sonali.”
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