VV Ganeshananthan, an American writer and journalist of Sri Lankan descent, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction last year for her book Brotherless Night, which revolves around a young woman in civil war-torn Sri Lanka who fiercely wants to pursue her dreams of being a doctor as her brothers get swept in the violence. The author, who was at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2025, talks about the book, being a diaspora writer, and more. Edited excerpts:
Brotherless Night was written over a time period of two decades. What was the driving force for you to tell the story despite how long it took?
Honestly, when I started, I had no idea how long it would take! But I wanted to understand this history, and I didn’t put a clock on that ambition. I was able to keep going largely because of the community of people who encouraged and supported me, many of whom had lived through the 1980s or other tumultuous times in Jaffna or other parts of Sri Lanka. I knew some of these people before I began, but I also had the great privilege of getting to know others through my research. And I wanted to be accountable to all of them.
When you write a fictional tale set in the real world, as you’ve done in your books, how difficult is it to balance facts, fiction, and feelings?
My novel (Brotherless Night) is in the first-person voice of a fictional Tamil woman, a character I invented, and who spoke to me so clearly, she made the book necessary. Everything in the novel is filtered through the window of her character. And balance is part of her character and motivation, but so is the intensity of feeling, because she’s trying to be honest. It seems to me like a good story often has the kind of balance you’re describing built right into its structure and nature.
After your 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction win, you said ‘writing is always political’. Why do you think so?
Any piece of writing sets its terms and priorities, and in doing must necessarily forsake other paths. Of course, those kinds of choices have political meaning. You are relinquishing some tools to gain access to others; you are also saying what you think is important, what deserves inclusion and perhaps even centrality. How could that be apolitical?
Not a lot of time has passed since the civil war in Sri Lanka ended—barely 15 years. Did you face any challenges in writing the story of a time that would still be fresh in memory?
I did end up focusing on the beginning of the war, and that being farther in the past probably helped in certain ways; people had had time to reflect on it. But regarding the end of the war, given that some narratives have been suppressed or erased, freshness seems an aid to the preservation of truth.
You’ve often talked about how being from a diaspora community puts writers in a moral dilemma — struggling to claim your right to write about the land you had to flee from. Please tell us about that.
I would paraphrase my past comments slightly differently. Not all diaspora writers fled. I myself did not (I was born in the US). But it’s true that in certain spaces we have authority over the narratives of the homeland for no better reason than that we are the only people in the room connected to the country by descent; in other spaces, we are immediately discredited or silenced because we weren’t born there. I prefer to have authority, of course, and I like to have it for a good reason. In this case, the way to get there was research.
What keeps you writing?
I co-host a literary hub podcast about literature and the news and have done so since 2017. That show helped significantly as I thought through questions related to my book.
