V. V. Ganeshananthan

V. V. Ganeshananthan is an American novelist and journalist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, born in 1979. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. A former journalism professor, she co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. She grew up in Washington, D.C., in a Tamil diaspora community and draws heavily on Sri Lankan history and culture in her work. Ganeshananthan's debut novel Love Marriage (2008) explored the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her long-awaited second novel Brotherless Night (2023), set during the Sri Lankan Civil War through the eyes of a young Tamil woman who becomes a nurse while her brothers join different factions of the conflict, won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024. The novel is widely praised for its unflinching portrayal of war's cost and its careful documentation of a neglected historical tragedy.