Skip to main content

‘Don’t read just one book about Sri Lanka’: VV Ganeshananthan on her civil war novel

Women’s prize for fiction winner tells story of a family caught up in conflict in her second novel, Brotherless Night

Every couple of years VV Ganeshananthan would do a poll on Facebook asking people to nominate their saddest novel. The uncontested winner was Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about India during the turbulent 70s and 80s, a novel that Ganeshananthan loves. Now, with her second novel, Brotherless Night, which on Thursday night was awarded the Women’s prize for fiction, the American novelist has written a story to rival Mistry’s 1995 weepy.

We are talking in her UK publisher’s office, in a room with a view of the US embassy. “I have to apologise for my nation for so many things,” she says with a resigned eye roll. The author, who trained as a journalist, teaches fiction and nonfiction at the University of Minnesota and also co-hosts the Lit Hub Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which was set up in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump to shine a light on current events through literature. Her first novel, Love Marriage, about two Tamil families, was longlisted for the Women’s prize (then the Orange prize) in 2009.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/tQrsJ9a
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Rico Lewis helped harden up Manchester City’s treble challenge | Jamie Jackson

Guardiola believes advent of the teenage talent sowed seeds of change that turned his side into champions again Mid-January, the Etihad Campus. Before Tottenham’s visit a discontented Pep Guardiola is addressing a Manchester City team meeting that includes Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, John Stones and Ederson. The champions are in second place, eight points behind Arsenal, each having played 18 games. Performances have dipped and so has the attitude of his players. The final match before the World Cup was a 2-1 home defeat by Brentford . Since the tournament, City have beaten Leeds and Chelsea, drawn with Everton and lost their previous outing , 2-1 at Manchester United. Seven points from 15 is not championship-defending form and, when being knocked out of the Carabao Cup by Southampton is factored in, Guardiola can see City’s campaign derailing. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/h8WjbMX
Post a Comment
Read more

Wandsworth escape accused says it was ‘foolish’ to jail him with his ‘skill set’

Daniel Khalife, 23, says he absconded because he was ‘terrified’ of being locked up with dangerous offenders A former British soldier has told a jury he did not hand himself in after he escaped from prison because he was “finally demonstrating what a foolish idea it was” to imprison someone with his “skill set”. Daniel Khalife, 23, told the court he absconded from Wandsworth prison while on remand because he was “terrified” of being locked up with “serious sex offenders” and “terrorists” who wanted to kill him, and that he did not think his imprisonment would be in the public interest. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/vRZHkaw
Post a Comment
Read more

Bodies of Men: the love story taking on toxic masculinity in a time of war

Nigel Featherstone’s new novel tackles traditional conservatism and patriarchy through an unconventional romance How can you be a man and be anti-war? This is the question that Sydney-born novelist Nigel Featherstone, who is a pacifist, considered while he took up a three-month writing residency in a military library. He set out to discover what happens to very different expressions of masculinity placed under military pressure. “Australia does have a very defined, toxic brand of masculinity,” says the bespectacled Featherstone, seated by the window at his local pub facing the railway station at Goulburn, north of Canberra, while men on stools at the nearby bar sink beers and televisions on the walls screen horse racing results. Continue reading... from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2N8piOc
Post a Comment
Read more