I’m a Sri Lankan author, programmer and general tinkerer. My fiction deals primarily with science fiction - AI, power, post-colonial futures, the texture of technology as it’s actually experienced by people on the margins.
If you’re looking for my fantasy penname, see Victor Konara.
Outside fiction, I do data science, investigative journalism, and the occasional policy work; I also write the occasional bit of software here and there. These three streams have been running in parallel for most of my adult life.
For bios, press photos, and media contact information, see the Press page.
Writing
My fiction spans multi-book series - the Salvage Crew universe (Aethon Books) and the Commonwealth Empire trilogy (HarperCollins India) - as well as standalones published by Perera Hussein. My short fiction has appeared in avenues like Wired, Slate, the Big Book of Cyberpunk. A full list is in the Books and Short Fiction sections.
Beyond prose: games, software tools, and other projects that resist easy categorisation live in Experiments and Software.
I also contribute to the SciFi Economics Lab, a spin-off from the Edgeryders research network that uses speculative fiction to stress-test alternate economic systems and get the underlying principles right. The flagship project is Witness - an open-source, collaboratively built fictional city - which also spawned Witness: the Game, a card game about governing radically different societies through waves of crises.
Career (non-fiction)
Open Society Fellow, 2025.
Appointed to Sri Lanka’s National AI Advisory Committee, 2025. Working on making it easier for citizens to interact with government via the Government Information Center, and on dataset creation for Sinhala and Tamil - something I’ve been circling for a while.
Co-founded Dossiers (2022–2025), a KYC + AML solution for banks, financial institutions, and journalists. On Meta’s Llama Hall of Fame, 2024, for work with locally fine-tuned AI models. Exited 2025.
Co-founded Watchdog (2019–), a nonprofit for data journalism and civic technology in Sri Lanka. As CEO, raised over $400k and built a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, journalists, and researchers. Led major investigations: satellite imagery analysis to locate mass graves; archiving and analysis of vast government data to explain electricity and infrastructure failures; building open-source medical donations software subsequently used by the Red Cross and Ministry of Health in Sri Lanka.
LIRNEasia (2017–2020), a regional think tank. Computational social science research and machine learning - projects involving billions of call detail records, social media friend networks, and corpora for low-resource languages including Sinhala and Bengali. Contributed to Sri Lanka’s data protection act. Published widely on corpus linguistics, misinformation, and hate speech.
WSO2 (2016–2017), a major middleware provider. Technical writing and early data science work - whitepapers around client implementations (Transport for London, Government of Moldova), and designed and led the implementation of WSO2’s election monitor.
Readme.LK (2014–2016), founding editor of a leading Sri Lankan technology publication.
Started in retail at Redline Technologies, Majestic City, Colombo. Learned how to build computers and how retail supply chains work.
Research
My academic papers - most of them written at LIRNEasia - sit at the intersection of NLP, machine learning, and computational social science. The main threads: building language resources for low-resource languages (Sinhala, Bengali); studying how misinformation and hate speech spread on social media and how to detect them; and applying data analytics to policy-relevant questions around poverty, connectivity, and governance.
Full list of papers: Google Scholar profile
Beyond academic papers, some notable long-form reports:
The Ocean of Change - mapping inevitable changes across the Asia-Pacific on a 2030 timeline. Content analysis of national policy documents and futures forecasts, paired with statistical projections from the APERC, UNDP, and others. Produced by LIRNEasia with UNDP funding.
Weaponising 280 Characters - 22-page investigation into a wave of bot followers targeting Sri Lankan Twitter users after March 2018. Analysis of 17 block lists, ~4,000 bots, 200,000+ tweets.
The Facebook Ban in Sri Lanka: a 30,000 Foot View - analysis of 63,800 Facebook posts and 30,000 tweets examining whether Sri Lanka’s March 2018 social media block actually worked.
Mapping Election Influence on Social Media: Twitter and Facebook - analysis of the 2015 Sri Lankan general election’s social media landscape, covering influence networks, tactics, and platform dynamics.
This is the Colombo Port City? - early investigative piece on the Colombo Port City project, written when it was still under government secrecy. I was one of the first journalists allowed in.