Sri Lankan American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist V. V. Ganeshananthan has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel “Brotherless Night,” about a family torn apart by Sri Lanka’s long civil war. It follows Sashi, a sixteen-year-old aspiring doctor, growing up in Jaffna in the 1980s. Her close family is torn apart by the onset of civil war.
According to the award website, the book “vividly and compassionately centers itself around erased and marginalized stories – Tamil women, students, teachers, ordinary civilians – exploring the moral nuances of violence and terrorism against a backdrop of oppression and exile.”
Novelist Monica Ali, who chaired the fiction judging panel, descried “Brotherless Night” as “a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war.”
Ganeshananthan’s first novel, “Love Marriage,” was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post.
In an interview posted on the Women’s Prize Trust website, she was inspired to write the book by “the stories she grew up listening of friends and family who had lived through this period in Jaffna.” She was “especially moved by the stories of women who worked to keep their families safe under brutal circumstances,” she said. She was also inspired by a nonfiction book called “The Broken Palmyra,” in which “four Tamil professors at the University of Jaffna documented the violence civilians endured at the hands of majority Sinhalese-dominated state security forces, Indian peacekeepers, and Tamil militant groups,” she added.
She said she had fun “portraying Sashi and her four brothers — they have complex and lively relationships, are cruel and kind to each other, and share unexpected moments of wit and humor. As I wrote, they continually surprised me..” But “much of the book’s source material is violent,” she said, and she was “writing about the emotional effects of that violence..” But “the biggest challenge of writing this book was depicting that brutality honestly, without either sensationalizing it or diminishing it. I needed to balance that with the stories of those who resisted,” she said.
She told The Washington Post that writing the book “was hard.” Explaining she said:
“Writing historical fiction carefully and thoughtfully about a traumatic conflict well within living memory that was true to people’s experience was hard work. It took such a long time because of the chorus of people it was necessary to talk to.” She hoped that writing “can push people to collective actual action,” when faced with conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war.
Ganeshananthan currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
Top photo: Women’s Prize Trust website
