Interview with a Historical Fiction Author: V.V. Ganeshananthan & Brotherless Night

The Author:

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Love Marriage, which was 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. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships.
She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Ganeshananthan’s novel Brotherless Night, a story about a young woman’s part and experience in the Sri Lankan civil war, was published this January. She shared some interesting behind-the-scenes information about the book in this interview:

The Interview:

Hannah Karau: First off, I want to say congratulations! Your historical fiction novel Brotherless Night came out on January 3rd and has been receiving a lot of positive attention. Can you tell me about your inspiration for the book?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: My inspiration for the book was a piece of research that I found after a trip to Sri Lanka. During the trip, I bought a lot of books about Sri Lankan history, and on the way back home, I was reading all of them, looking for things that might inform my fiction. I found the story of a hunger strike at a temple and was really interested in it. But I also knew that I could not fit it into the novel that I was working on then, which was later published as my first novel, Love Marriage. So I took that piece of research and started telling a new story and that became the first piece of Brotherless Night.

HK: You were a journalist before you published novels, right? How did your experience in journalism help you write Brotherless Night? 

VVG: My experience in journalism was hugely helpful to me as I researched Brotherless Night. First and foremost, it gave me the skills to interview people. So I had some comfort with doing interviews, and also requesting them, which was something that I had learned in newsrooms. I also spent a lot of time reading books and reconciling various contradictory accounts, versions of stories that omitted different details or emphasized different things. And I was able to compare those and do a little bit of fact-checking. I think my interest in and ability to do that also came from journalism. 

HK: Why was writing about this period in Sri Lanka important to you?

VVG: I was interested in writing about this period in Sri Lankan history because I was curious about the ways in which the beginning of the war—which is in some ways as hotly contested as its ending—had fed into what happened. The story of the end of the war, which was famously brutal, or rather infamously brutal, has been told a lot since the war ended. But the period of the 1980s, the beginning of the war, had not been examined with the same level of attention, at least not in English-language fiction. There's some exceptional fiction that looks at the run-up to the war, and here I’m thinking specifically of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and then a fair amount of it that stops shortly after, or focuses on the events that mark the beginning of the war, which are the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms that took place in Colombo and all over the rest of Sri Lanka, which are known as Black July. So some stories stopped there and didn't go forward, and I was interested in seeing if that period, which is incredibly complicated, could be captured in fiction. And I had grown up on stories of that period of time, so it seemed to me that it was something that could be done, and probably should be done.

HK: How has writing and publishing Brotherless Night impacted you?

VVG: Writing Brotherless Night had, of course, a huge impact on me because it's a project that I began in January 2004 and I finished it, really, in July 2022, when I dotted the last i and crossed the last t. So it has taken just a huge chunk of my life. In terms of publishing, I think I'm at the beginning of understanding how that might impact me, because it's still very early in the book’s publication history. It only came out about three months ago, in January, so I am still hearing from a lot of people and the book is still finding its way into various hands. It was published in the United States on January 3, and it will come out in the United Kingdom and former Commonwealth territories—which is the way that publishing categorizes those regions—at the end of June. So I'm very interested to see what people's reactions will be there as well.

HK: What is your next writing project and what will it entail?

VVG: I have a few different writing projects in progress, some of which involve essays and short stories that were paths that branched off from Brotherless Night. I have also, occasionally, been working on some comic fiction, which is partly the result of a set of humor classes that I taught during the period of time in which I was writing Brotherless Night. As I read comic fiction, I got more and more interested in writing it, so that, I think, is definitely in the future.

HK: Thank you for your time! Best of luck with the UK release.