One of the most authentic voices from the Sri Lankan diaspora, V.V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award and the Asian Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize, and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her writing has been featured in various publications, including Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Non-required Reading.

She was previously a vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. At present, she is a member of the boards for both the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English.

The Asian Review is excited to showcase V.V. Ganeshananthan, discussing Brotherless Night, which is longlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction 2023.

First of all, the heartiest congratulations from The Asian Group of Literature and The Asian Review for the success of Brotherless Night. But you started your literary journey with Love Marriage. Can you tell us about your debut novel and what inspired you to write it?

Love Marriage is the story of a young American woman of Ilankai Tamil descent who travels to Toronto with her family to meet her estranged uncle when he resurfaces after many years. A founding member of the Tamil Tigers, he is now dying of cancer. As she asks him questions about their family, a rich and complex past emerges, along with challenging truths about the long consequences of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I wrote this novel partly to think through the connections between the present realities of our diaspora communities and the histories of Sri Lanka that younger generations do not always know.

Brotherless Night comes out in 2023, 15 years after Love Marriage, and stirs the literary world. Can you tell us the unseen and the unknown of these years of silence? 

I’d like to think I wasn’t totally silent during these years, though I recognize that books and shorter pieces register differently. I published short fiction, including excerpts of Brotherless Night; some essays; some poetry; some journalism; and some reviews. I taught at a few different universities, lived in six U.S. states, and spent one longer stint overseas; I did a fair amount of research and thinking about how I wanted Brotherless Night to be. I also spent some time adapting to chronic hand injuries that limit my typing. I learned how to work with someone else typing for me, as well as with voice recognition. That last part was fairly challenging, and I continue to work with those adaptive strategies today.

There are a number of good books written about Sri Lanka’s civil conflict; what is the added value Brotherless Night brings to Sri Lanka’s war literature? 

They say you should write the book you want to read. I wrote Brotherless Night because I wanted to read a book set in Jaffna during this time period—one focused on civilian lives, particularly those of Tamil women, students, teachers, and political dissidents. I wanted to put erased and marginalised stories at the centre of my canvas, and I wanted the specifics of those stories to be clear—for what happened in this time period to be fathomable, or at least something that I personally attempted to fathom. I’m happy that this novel is in conversation with other stories I admire and appreciate. And I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with people who endured this particular era and who held me to a high standard.

You worked as a journalist before. Now, you are an academic and a fiction writer. How do those three spheres intersect? Do they complement each other?

As an academic, I teach fiction and nonfiction writing, and discuss books with my students. As a journalist, I interview people, including experts, on a range of topics, and review fiction and nonfiction books, including academic texts. Finally, as a fiction writer, I draw on my journalistic and scholarly training for research, storytelling, editing, and writing. All three fields have offered me useful modes for considering ethics. And I am grateful to have had space to pursue all three, rather than having to choose between them.

Books and writing transform writers. How has Brotherless Night and its writing process transformed the person called Sugi Ganeshananthan?

It’s hard, of course, to separate the effect of the book from the two decades that transpired as it was written, and therefore this question may also be better put to someone who knew me before I started it and who knows me now. But from my limited point of view, I am perhaps most transformed by knowing rather than wondering if I could write this book.

Fiction writers seldom stop writing; they live with unfinished stories and wander in secret gardens in their imagination. How far does this reflect you? 

Certainly I live with unfinished stories! But I think most people do, not just writers.

Thank you so much for your time. Any parting words? 

Thank you so much for your care and attention to my work. I wrote a book that is mostly set in South Asia, with sentences animated by the relationship between English and a South Asian language (Tamil), about South Asian people and history. I really appreciate the opportunity to engage with South Asian readers, and with a thoughtful, deeply engaged publication dedicated to South Asia.

By Rohana Kaluarachchi