Neluka Silva is a Senior Professor in English at the University of Colombo, and former Head of Department and Director of Studies, Faculty of Arts, and was the President of the University of Oxford Alumni Society of Sri Lanka. She is the founder/director of Kids @ Play, a children’s theatre workshop. She was educated at the Universities of Colombo, Leeds, Oxford, and Cambridge. She teaches courses on Children’s Literature at the University of Colombo, and Technical University, Dresden, Germany. Her novel The Iron Fence (2011) was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize and was longlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Prize 2012 and the Dublin IMPAC prize 2012. She has two collections of short stories: The Rolled Back Beach with Simon Harris (2008) and Our Neighbours and other stories (2009). “Our Neighbours” was one of the 20 stories placed in the Highly Commended Winner category in the 2008 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

She was an invited author, moderator at the Galle Literary Festival 2012 and conducted two creative writing workshops for the Children's Programme in 2012. In addition, she conducted Writing Workshops for Children in the Galle District as a part of the Galle Literary Festival Outreach Programme 2009, and for the Galle Children’s festival in October 2011. She has also conducted Writing Workshops at Milk and workshops for young adults at the American Centre’s Writers’ Lab programme and creative writing workshops for children. Following her Creative Writing Workshops for children, her young authors published Eagle Eyes and Other Stories in 2018. She has also published a collection of short stories for children, My Elephant Secret and other Stories (2019), and published two stories, Moona Finds Friends and Oshana and the Sili Sili Bag (2023), to introduce children to environmental conservation issues.

Her academic works include The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writing from South Asia (Sage 2004) and The Hybrid Island: Culture Crossings and the Invention of Identity in Sri Lanka (edited 2002), and journal articles and chapters in academic books. She has been a visiting professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; Roskilde University and Aarhus University, Denmark; Justus Liebig University and Technical University, Germany; the University of Barcelona, Spain; the University of Athens, Greece; and the University of Liège, Belgium.