American author V. V. Ganeshananthan has won the US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her novel Brotherless Night, a story about a Tamil teenager who pursues her dream of becoming a doctor until her brothers are drawn into the 30-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, a minority insurgent group.
The largest English-language literary prize in the world for women and non-binary authors also comes with a coveted residency at one of the Fogo Island Inn studios, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Four finalists will each receive US$12,500: Eleanor Catton for Birnam Wood, Claudia Dey for Daughter, Kim Coleman Foote for Coleman Hill and Janika Oza for A History of Burning.
Brotherless Night is Ganeshananthan’s second novel after Love Marriage, which was long listed for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her latest explores how ordinary people can be swept up in political violence and one woman’s moral journey through war, shaped by atrocities committed by both sides. “Through her sensitively crafted characters, V. V. Ganeshananthan asks us to consider how history is told, whom it serves, and the many truths it leaves out. A magnificent book,” the jury said about the deeply researched book.
Ganeshananthan, an associate English professor at the University of Minnesota, wanted the story to show the importance of the way women support each other. She started writing the book in 2004 and finished in 2022, according to an essay on time.com, in part because of debilitating arm and hand pain that required her to adapt by speaking her sentences into Google docs with its voice typing tool.
Brotherless Night is just the second novel to win the Carol Shields prize, named in honour of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Canadian writer of The Stone Diaries who died in 2003. Twenty years later, the first prize was awarded to American poet Fatimah Asghar for her novel When We Were Sisters.
