Hello. I’m Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Award-winning author, programmer, and general tinkerer. Current location: Kandy, Sri Lanka

Quick links

Science fiction, economics, technology, politics — and the places they collide.

Novels
The Salvage Crew, Pilgrim Machines, The Wretched and the Damned, Numbercaste - and more. My stories have won the Gratiaen Prize, been nominated for the Nebula, and been Washington Post and Audible bestseller.
Short fiction
Published in Wired, the Big Book of Cyberpunk, ASU’s Future Tense, and commissioned by the Lancet and the Financial Times.
Nonfiction
A decade of journalism, data science, and policy research. Work in Foreign Policy, Routledge, MIT Press. Built Watchdog, one of Sri Lanka’s leading factchecking and OSINT operations.
Software
Tools for exploring fiction (Galaxy Generator) and useful gadgets for life (Mokuton, a one-file browser word processor). Occasional government prototypes.
Experiments
Contributed to Neurocracy (New Media Writing Prize winner) and Witness, an EU Horizon 2020-funded card game simulating societies under pressure.

I’m a Dangerous Speech Fellow, TEDx speaker, Forbes 30 Under 30, and current Open Society Fellow (2025). My misinformation work has been covered by the New York Times, BBC, and Foreign Policy. The Watchdog story — building a factchecking operation as Sri Lanka fell apart — is covered in Rest of World and Niemann Lab.
The Salvage Crew series is an extended literary experiment in procedural generation, apophenia, and AI — the code and the fiction feed each other.
The economics thinking feeds into the SciFi Economics Lab, where economists, anthropologists, and artists stress-test social contracts in constrained fictional settings.

I spent the rest of my time gardening, falling down rabbitholes, and limping after an oddball cast of humans, cats, monkeys and deer.

Drop me a line if you want to chat about any of it.