Brotherless Night with V. V. Ganeshananthan

Collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook host V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her 2023 novel, Brotherless Night, (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year). With the novel as our guide, we ask this author about her inspirations for Brotherless Night and its characters and stories, and about the responsibility that comes with writing fiction about the Sri Lankan civil war.

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields 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. 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. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Since 2017, she has co-hosted the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.