V.V.

Ganeshananthan

Award Winning Novelist

Essayist & Book Reviewer

Travels from: Minneapolis, MN

“A blazingly brilliant novel . . . With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how—and as importantly, why—to survive.” — Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, the 2023 Asian Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She writes fiction engaging Sri Lankan politics, histories, and diasporas, particularly those connected to Tamil and other minority communities. She also writes media criticism, reported essays, and book reviews. As a disabled writer, she engages questions of access and equity in all of her work, and also uses adaptive technologies and strategies to write.

A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of 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 been visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland and now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her family and dogs.

V.V.'s Featured Titles

Brotherless Night: A Novel

Random House |

January 3, 2023

Literary Fiction

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half).

“This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.”—Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.

Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage, Fiction, Grief & Loss, Historical Fiction, Military & War

Love Marriage: A Novel

Random House Publishing Group |

April 8, 2008

Literary Fiction

In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3]

The daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, Yalini finds herself caught between the traditions of her ancestors and the lure of her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, Yalini is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.

While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots-and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils-through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, Yalini must decide where she stands.

Lyrical and innovative, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel brilliantly unfolds how generations of struggle both form and fractures families.

Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage, Fiction, Immigrant & Refugee Perspectives, Parenting & Families

The Fact of Your Imagination: Using Journalistic Techniques for Fiction

In this talk, I discuss how newsroom training and experience has influenced my fiction. I talk about specific strategies for generating new work; research, including interview techniques from various fields and disciplines; and editing.

Changing the Plot: The Radical Revision of What Happens Next

In this talk, I consider the relationship between revision and plot. As acclaimed writer and teacher Charles Baxter notes in the classic essay, “Against Epiphany,” while authors like O’Connor and Joyce aimed for sublime revelation, the main reason readers turn pages is to find out what happens next. But many writers struggle to connect cause and effect in initial drafts, and fail to recognize possibilities they have missed in composition. Using vocabulary developed by Baxter, I explain how tightening the screws of plot can take revision to another level.

Imagining History: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of the Past

In this talk, I discuss writing about the contested histories of the Sri Lankan civil war and explain the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of my approach. Drawing on the concept of Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story,” I consider the relationship between political propaganda and community storytelling, and reflect on the unique power of fiction to respond to censorship and erasure.

The Politics of Grief

In this talk, I reflect on the connection between private and public grief in an era of widespread human rights violations. As civilians face brutal, unchecked violence perpetrated by state and non-state actors, those same atrocities are captured and reenacted through an unprecedented level of documentation and broadcast. How can art address atrocity without reentrenching it? What does an ethical depiction of violence look like? In books laden with trauma and grief, what keeps readers turning the pages?

“The most fully realized new novel that I have read in a good while . . . Ganeshananthan’s considerable achievement, it seems to me, is in carrying off this big, ambitious thriller of a conflict novel—crossing years of growth and great events, fleshed out with ample research on the textures of moment and place—without losing the intimacy and reflective center of a character portrait. . . . Brotherless Night succeeds in telling all its stories—the historical and the personal, the factual and the ethical—as one, and that narrative has echoes. Ganeshananthan is writing about Sri Lanka, but she is an American novelist. This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.” — Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

“A blazingly brilliant novel… With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V.V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of a world full of turmoil, but one in which human connections and shared stories can teach us how—and as importantly, why—to survive.” — Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

“Moving…. a story about “terrorists” that destroys the very sense of that word.” — BookPage

“V.V. Ganeshananthan knows how to grab the reader’s attention and hold it in her propulsive second novel, Brotherless Night…. Ganeshananthan’s attention to the small details of love, of caring, of human empathy make the reader feel deeply for all her characters…. Riveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war, “Brotherless Night” is a masterpiece.” — May-lee Chai, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Short Fiction Link

Essays and Journalism

Poetry

Fiction/Non/Fiction Podcast Link

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Women’s Prize for Fiction (2024)
Carol Shields Prize (2024)
Asian Prize (2023)
New York Times Editors’ Choice, Brotherless Night
An NPR Book of the Year (2023), Brotherless Night