Women’s Prize Winner VV Ganeshananthan: ‘In America, I Grew Up With Propaganda’

The day after winning the 2024 Women’s Prize for her second novel Brotherless Night, VV Ganeshananthan still hasn’t quite digested things. “I still feel quite stunned,” she says, when I ask her how she’s doing.

While any writer might well be overwhelmed by such an accolade, for Ganeshananthan, the sheer amount of time spent working on Brotherless Night – two decades – surely makes the win especially monumental.

“I started it in 2004, when I was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop,” she explains. “I came across a reference to a hunger strike… and then wrote about a person watching [it]. And that was my protagonist.”

As well as delivering her narrator, the hunger strike itself would also prove pivotal to the novel her project would become 20 years later.

But first things first. When we meet Ganeshananthan’s protagonist, Sashi Kulenthiren, in Brotherless Night, it is 1981 and she is a 16-year-old Tamil girl whose biggest worry is passing her exams.

Living with her parents and four beloved brothers in Jaffna – an historically Tamil city in northern Sri Lanka – Sashi dreams of becoming a doctor; as the book continues, her family, country and aspirations are turned upside down by a conflict that spans three decades.

Combining the scope of an epic, the immersive detail of a history book, and the intimacy of a family drama, Brotherless Night is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, when fighting between the country’s minority Tamil population and its majority Sinhalese government cost up to 100,000 lives between 1983 and 2009.

Apart from brief episodes in New York and London, the book holds its focus on 1980s Jaffna. “It turns out that I find [that setting] fascinating,” says Ganeshananthan. “And of course, one way to understand the end of a war is to look at its beginning.”

When we meet over video call – me in sweltering Athens, she in chilly London – Ganeshananthan is wry and warm. An avid writer and reader from a young age – “I loved Madeline L’Engle, [and] Anne of Green Gables” – she studied journalism at Harvard, which became her early career. All the while, she was writing fiction; her first novel Love Marriage was published in 2008, and like Brotherless Night, it touches on the lingering effects of war even after leaving it behind.

“I could not leave such a country, or its war; it followed me and whispered in my ears, even when I clapped my hands over them and screamed for it to stop,” says Sashi.

Born in the US state of Connecticut, to Sri Lankan Tamil parents who left the country in the 1970s, Ganeshananthan grew up with stories about Sri Lanka, specifically Jaffna; her research for Brotherless Night involved extensive interviews with people who lived in Jaffna during the war. As an adult, she visits the country regularly.

When she began writing Brotherless Night, “My spellcheck was set to British English,” she says. “Sri Lankan English would have been very British-influenced, and Sashi would not be speaking with American vocabulary. So from the beginning I was like, I’ve got ‘practise’ with an ‘se’; I’ve got colour with a ‘u’…”

That all-encompassing commitment to her narrator’s world is evident throughout Brotherless Night, which depicts Sashi’s complex inner life with blazing precision.

As one brother after another is claimed by the war – either killed or recruited into the militant Tamil Tigers – she finds herself “subject to the movements of the tectonic plates of history”, Ganeshananthan tells me.

Against the backdrop of war, other ideologies are magnified: “It was the women who did the needful,” says Sashi of her Tamil community. Whether she’s working for the Tigers or trying to be a dutiful daughter, gendered expectations follow Sashi everywhere she goes: “To see a young woman going around by herself like that in Jaffna at that time was a serious thing,” she remarks.

That feminist bent makes the book’s Women’s Prize win even more apt. Last month, Ganeshananthan also won the Carol Shields prize for women and non-binary writers.

“It did not escape my notice that this feminist novel is being honoured by organisations that are feminist, and I really appreciate that,” says the author.

“All the women I know are so smart. These sharp knives are just constantly being handed cardboard and expected to be pleased. So, just to be in the company of people who are like, ‘Oh, of course what you have to say is important…’ what a treat.”

No such mercies for Sashi. Although she eventually succeeds in becoming a medical student, she finds herself caught between fury at the war’s thoughtless violence and a desire to help people no matter what their beliefs.

Things are further complicated by her romantic feelings for K, the high-ranking Tiger and childhood neighbour who entreats her to help at a field hospital: “I’m not sure I am right to ask. But we need you.”

As the book continues, Sashi is pulled in more directions as she begins to write and circulate anonymous accounts of the war – often speaking out against the Tigers – with her beloved professor Anjali Premachandran.

As well as charting military and political history, the novel attends to the minutiae of its character’s lives: the meals they eat, the loves they nurse, the jokes they tell even when the sky seems to be caving in, allowing a seamless intimacy with the reader: “Chelvi, who had my copy of Feminism and Nationalism, promised to bring it. ‘You had better,’ I joked. ‘I’ll need it. Did you see all my angry margin notes?’”

Sashi and K’s unrealised romance threads through Brotherless Night, a glaring absence where love should have been. As Sashi says: “I wanted the life on the other side of the war’s looking-glass, the future we might have had, and which no longer existed.”

War claims lives in more ways than brute violence and – spoiler alert – when K asks Sashi to attend him during a public hunger strike, ending in his death, she looks on with baffled heartbreak as the Tigers claim him as a saint. “They buttoned up his dear body in its brown shirt… They draped the Tiger sash around K’s shoulders.”

Brotherless Night is ruefully eloquent about the ways in which stories like K’s are co-opted to different ends. “Like every American, and maybe most people of Sri Lankan descent, I grew up with some amount of propaganda,” says Ganeshananthan. “I was interested in how the story of the war has been told, both within Sri Lanka and outside it. What does it mean to explain? Who gets explanations and who delivers them?”

Those questions are posed in as well as by the novel, where fiction is peppered with fact. Anjali is based on a real person – Rajani Thiranagama, professor of anatomy at the University of Jaffna in the 1980s – while the reports she and Sashi write together are inspired by The Broken Palmyra (1989), a book compiled by four Jaffna university academics (including Thiranagama), recording atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan state, the Tamil Tigers and Indian peacekeepers alike.

Despite its historical footing, she is keen to free her work from any albatrosses of accuracy. “Talking to people was really helpful [as research] – but also for enlarging the space of invention, right?”

Certainly, the prose’s mix of fact and fiction allows it to move masterfully from personal, familial scenes – “from the window came the sound of my parents talking to each other, my father joking and my mother telling him how to do something” – to the conflict’s larger picture.

“My beloved Jaffna General Hospital, despite its status as a declared safe zone, had been damaged… At the field hospital people waited to be treated in long queues; they clustered close together, and I could not keep up.”

Besides Sashi, the book is brimming with doctors – her eldest brother Niranjan, her professor Anjali; K nearly joins their medical ranks, but drops out to join the Tigers. The book’s physicians provide a compelling foil for its hearty helping of death and pain, but medicine is a personal passion for Ganeshananthan as well as a narrative device: “I think doctors are the best,” she says. “And also, their role in the war – they were often in quite complex situations,” she explains. “I mean, you can see in Gaza the ways that healthcare is under attack… In [my research] material I was always reading about, what was the situation at the hospital? What were their supplies? How many doctors were left?”

Doctors can heal bodily injuries, but emotional scars are trickier to deal with. For me, Ganeshananthan’s novel about war – the traumatising of boys by one violent regime begetting another, a cycle of pain – evokes contemporary conflicts. But while such comparisons might feel close at hand, Brotherless Night insists on its own specificity. “This period of history is so dense with complexity, there was a real question of whether I could get my hands around it,” says Ganeshananthan. “But I really wanted it to be so specifically this, and to insist on the importance of this setting.”

That conviction pulses through Brotherless Night, whose author gives her readers a genuine gift in such a richly researched – and keenly felt – story. Balancing fact, feeling and fiction, VV Ganeshananthan’s second novel might have been a long time coming, but it’s more than worth the wait.

‘Brotherless Night’ is published by Penguin (£9.99 paperback)

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