Women’s prize for fiction winner tells story of a family caught up in conflict in her second novel, Brotherless Night
VV Ganeshananthan says she ‘grew up in a world of people who cared about politics and talked about politics, even if my particular family did not’.VV Ganeshananthan says she ‘grew up in a world of people who cared about politics and talked about politics, even if my particular family did not’.very couple of years VV Ganeshananthan would do a poll on Facebook asking people to nominate their saddest novel.
“I grew up with stories of IPK violence and had not really seen that represented on the page,” she says. “Many people have referred to Sri Lanka as India’s Vietnam. As an American I feel that’s a useful, hard analogy.” The problem resurfaced during the pandemic when her hand swelled up horribly. The only way to finish Brotherless Night was to learn to use voice recognition software. “It’s useful, horrible, racist software,” she says of the glitches in voice recognition, though she adds that it is much improved since her student days in the late 90s. She says she has to “train it” if she wants it to pronounce her surname correctly . She also has to let other people type her work.
“That page was written pretty close to 9/11 in comparison to the rest of the novel,” Ganeshananthan says. “I grew up in a community where that language was slung at us. Even now, I will sometimes meet someone who says: ‘Oh, you’re Sri Lankan. And you’re Tamil so you must be a Tiger.’ It’s not funny.” In the novel it is “very intentionally a provocation designed to make people think about why they use that language.
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