[3][4][5] Having left school, at the age of 16 years Wickramasinghe found work as a book-keeper in a shop in Colombo owned by Carolis Silva in 1906.

In 1916, Martin Wickramasinghe starts to write to the Sinhala daily Dinamina under the penname Hethu Vaadi (Rationalist) and pens a controversial series called "Plants and Animals".

He then joins the editorial staff of Dinamina, owned by the press baron D. R. Wijewardena's Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited (ANCL).

Shortly thereafter he began a campaign to raise literary standards for the Sinhalese reading public with work such as Sahityodaya Katha (1932), Vichara Lipi (1941), Guttila Geetaya (1943) and Sinhala Sahityaye Nageema (1946) in which he evaluated the traditional literally heritage according to set rules of critical criteria formed by synthesising the best in Indian and western traditions of literary criticism.

He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1953 Coronation Honours with the ensign awarded by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in person during her Royal Visit to Ceylon in 1954.

It follows the spiritual problems of a fragile Sinhalese youth raised in a traditional Buddhist home after being confronted with the spectre of adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it all made more complex with the modernisation of society.

It drew inspiration from the work of Eliot, Pound, Whitman and other western poets and was part of a movement called Peradeniya School.

The movement dissolved in the 1960s prompted by Wickramasinghe's contention that other writers of the Peradeniya School were not sensitive to cultural traditions and the Buddhist background of Sinhalese society.

He accused Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Gunadasa Amarasekara and others of imitating "decadent" western and post-war Japanese literature and of supporting a nihilistic look on life with cynical disregard for national tradition.

In it the great teacher's change from royal heir in-waiting to philosopher-mendicant is portrayed as being a result of his sympathy to the poor and the downtrodden of society.

Their eldest surviving son Sarath Kusum Wickramasinghe, served as Sri Lankan High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1995 to 1999.

The Martin Wickramasinghe Trust has been established with the objectives of preservation of manuscripts, first editions of all his books, tape recording and photographs related to his life and work.