Martin Wickramasinghe (1890–1976) is generally regarded as the founder of the modern Sinhala novel and the most important Sinhala prose writer of the twentieth century.
He was born at Koggala on the southern coast and largely educated himself after leaving school early. He worked as a journalist and editor before turning to fiction. His major work is the trilogy Gamperaliya (1944), Kaliyugaya (1957) and Yuganthaya (1949), which follows the disintegration of a village landholding family across three generations as commerce, colonial education and urban life reorder rural society. Viragaya (1956) is his most formally ambitious novel, and Madol Duwa (1947) remains the best-known Sinhala book for younger readers.
He also wrote extensively on Buddhism, aesthetics and cultural history. His critical writing is markedly hostile to inherited hierarchy and to the idea that status should follow from birth — a position worth noting on a site about a caste.