This prize-winning novel spotlights civilian women during war

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The season of literary prizes, followed closely by the season of year-end “best of” lists, is also a time to acknowledge some recent books – even award-winning ones – that haven’t received enough attention. One of these is V.V. Ganeshananthan’s “Brotherless Night,” published in 2023, a novel about the Sri Lankan civil war that won both the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, following on the Asian Prize for Fiction the previous year.

Ganeshananthan took 15 years between publishing her debut, “Love Marriage,” and “Brotherless Night.” This amount of time was partly due to the scope of “Brotherless Night” and to her process, which involves accommodations for physical challenges.

The author has suffered pain in her hands and arms since childhood injuries to them. “The most recent phase began in 2021, essentially from pandemic overuse,” Ganeshananthan told me when we spoke over video in November. She was at her home in Minneapolis, where she lives with her family and teaches at the University of Minnesota. “A surprisingly large chunk of this novel was written using voice dictation in Google Docs.”

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She also has had a few assistants who work with her voice memos. “I’m really fortunate that the university has funded access assistance for me,” she said.

While Ganeshananthan admits that using voice dictation compromises her sense of “imaginative privacy,” it also kept her from overthinking her complicated novel. “I was interested in centering voices not traditionally at the center of the Sri Lankan war’s narration,” she said. That war, which stretched from 1983 to 2009, was between the Buddhist government, which attempted to control the minority Tamil population, most of whom are Hindu or Christian, and the Tamil Tigers, a guerrilla faction fighting for the rights of the minority group.

“The Tigers famously had a women’s wing, and while that interests me greatly, I knew from my own family that the predominant experience for many women was actually being a civilian,” Ganeshananthan said. “I wanted to represent that, to put those women at the center of what I was writing about. Students, dissidents, health-care workers, people living in proximity to those bearing arms, people displaced from their homes, all of that.”

The author’s parents came to the United States from Sri Lanka, and she was brought up in Bethesda, Maryland. “I read the entire Washington Post every day as a kid, which was a tremendous education in writing,” she said. “I would read things I knew nothing about, like Jennifer Frey on horse racing, Hank Stuever at Style, international news briefs and so on. I think it made me a very specific kind of writer with a vocabulary heavily influenced by growing up Beltway-adjacent and knowing people who worked for federal agencies, embassies and the like.”

Ganeshananthan, who was the managing editor of the Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate, has worked extensively as a journalist. Initially, her motivation to write “Brotherless Night” came from hearing stories from those she knew personally. When it came time to research, she wanted to interview others. “I was checking stories against each other to verify how people at that time were documenting human-rights violations.”

“If you had to defend your house, but you’re a civilian, what does that mean?” were among the questions she recounted asking sources. “Who’s in charge of that? Where’s the agency that oversees your personal home security?” One section of the novel involves a march organized by women on that very issue.

She noted that receiving the prizes had put her in conversation with a larger number of readers, though some of the opinions she cared about most in this case were very close to home. “Of course, the book is dedicated to my family, so it’s really important to me that they know I tried as hard as I could and paid as much attention as I could,” she said. “It has been really great to hear from people in my family who are pleased with how it came out and feel that it is a good representation of the feeling and texture of that time.”

Ganeshananthan stressed that her work is just one of many valuable books about the Sri Lankan Civil War. “There are so many other perspectives and writers,” she said. “Not only that, so much Sri Lankan Anglophone fiction is set in Colombo, the capital, and my family history is mostly from Jaffna, to the north. I wanted Jaffna, a place brutally affected by the war for decades, to have a share in the story.”

She said she “really appreciates” the people who have taken the trouble to build institutions, like the prizes she has won, that support the careers of women and nonbinary writers. “There’s plenty of data showing that people in those categories are not receiving the same kind of attention,” as some other groups do, she said.

That’s especially important to her as a woman who is writing about politics and conflict from a largely female perspective. “My work is in conversation with the work of a number of men who have taken on similar issues and topics,” she said. “And, at the same time, my novel is in part about a woman’s mind and consciousness. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to go beyond why that’s a worthy topic and delve into what she thinks, the very real and varied kinds of labor she undertakes in a world that would try to give her less agency than she would seize for herself.”

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Bethanne Patrick is a book critic, host of the podcast Missing Pages and author of the memoir “Life B.”

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