She was born in Sri Lanka and left for Norway as a small child. Today Kamzy Gunaratnam is Norway’s Minister of Transport. It is an impressive personal journey, but perhaps there is also a question in it for the country she left behind.
Kamzy Gunaratnam was appointed Norway’s Minister of Transport on September 11, 2026, joining the government of Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. It puts the 38-year-old Sri Lankan-born politician in charge of one of the most important portfolios in a highly developed European economy.
Born in Sri Lanka on March 27, 1988, Gunaratnam moved to Norway with her family in 1991. They initially settled in Hammerfest in Norway’s far north before later moving to Oslo.
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Her rise was not sudden. A member of Norway’s Labour Party, she entered Oslo City Council in 2007 and served as Oslo’s Deputy Mayor from 2015 to 2021. She subsequently entered the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, in 2021 and served as first deputy chair of its Transport and Communications Committee before being appointed Transport Minister.
There is another remarkable chapter to her story. Gunaratnam was on Utøya on July 22, 2011, when a terrorist attacked a Labour Party youth camp and murdered 69 people. She survived. She remained in politics.
There is something here for Sri Lanka beyond the familiar celebration of another Sri Lankan-born person doing exceptionally well overseas.
Norway did not make Gunaratnam a Cabinet minister because she was born in Sri Lanka. It appointed a Norwegian politician who had spent nearly two decades working her way through local government, national politics and the parliamentary machinery dealing with transport.
That distinction matters.
Sri Lanka is often proud when people born here, or descended from Sri Lankans, reach positions of consequence elsewhere. We celebrate the achievement, quite rightly. But perhaps we should occasionally ask the harder question.
What was it about the society they entered that allowed them to rise, and would somebody arriving in Sri Lanka as a three-year-old immigrant have been given the same opportunity?
That may be the more important part of Kamzy Gunaratnam’s story.
Be that as it may, from a Sri Lankan childhood to responsibility for helping keep Norway moving, it is quite a journey.
