She is the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil human rights activist and feminist Rajani Thiranagama, who was murdered by LTTE in 1989.
Her first book In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011.
Recounting her childhood days, she says that running into bunkers was a regular occurrence since the Sri Lankan army bombing started.
She also recounts listening to stories of Indian Army arriving in Sri Lanka and subsequent rumours of rapes.
[2] Since the fieldwork commenced at a time of ceasefire and negotiations between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government, Thiranagama could return to Jaffna as well as conduct research in the settlements of displaces Muslims.
Anthropologist Dennis B. McGilvray notes that the book provides a rare glimpse of Tamil and Muslim 'kinship and marriage bonds under conditions of extreme duress and displacement.
In doing so, the book also shows how the LTTE hardly spoke for the Tamil community as a whole, and challenges simplistic relationships between 'individuality' and 'ethnicity', on the one hand, and concepts of 'home' and 'homeland' on the other.