About Dilrukshi Handunnetti

Dilrukshi Handunnetti is an international award-winning investigative journalist, senior editor, trainer, researcher, and a rights advocate. She is a lawyer by training. She co-founded the Colombo-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and currently serves as a director after ending a four-year stint as its executive director.

She is presently employed as Mongabay’s Sri Lanka editor. A trained investigative journalist, she led the investigations desk at The Sunday Leader, a feisty investigative publication, and later held top editorial positions including Consultant Editor at the Weekend Express and Senior Associate Editor of the Sunday Observer before setting up CIR. The recipient of over 15 local and international awards for her excellence in investigative reporting, covering the environment and column writing, Handunnetti has bagged the most prestigious journalism awards at home including the award for Reporting Under Special Circumstances in 2012 for highlighting how relocation of over 300 war displaced families in the island’s North resulted in homelessness at grave risk to her safety and the coveted D. B. Dhanapala Award for Journalist of the Year.

She has reported on the violent conflict from a civilian-focused, non-military perspective and extensively written on issues of governance, national political, South Asian affairs, systemic corruption, gender, and environment. Handunnetti was part of a nine-member team to win the “Best Science Journalism on the world wide web” for the reports on the UK-based SciDivNet’s for their “outstanding Asian tsunami coverage” presented by The Association of British Science Writers in 2006.

In 2014, she won the prestigious WASH Media Award under the (SDGs Monitoring Category) for reporting excellence presented by the Stochholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). In June 2022, Dilrukshi won the prestigious Journalist of Courage and Impact Award presented by the Hawaii-based East West Center, and in November 2022, secured the coveted Vital Voices Fellowship offered exclusively to outstanding women leaders worldwide. Her work has appeared in the UK Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New Humanitarian, Himal Southasian, the New York Times and more. She is a columnist with the New Indian Express at present.