Manhattanville College’s annual Summer Writers’ Week brings nationally respected writers from a variety of disciplines to lead panels and craft courses for those seeking to jumpstart a summer of writing. This year, novelist V. V. Ganeshananthan will join an impressive roster of faculty as the session’s Keynote Reader.
V. V. Ganeshananthan 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, Ganeshananthan 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. Ganeshananthan 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.
During her reading, Ganeshananthan will read from “Brotherless Night.” Her blistering and timely new novel is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war. The novel was added to the New York Times’ Editor’s Choice list and is described as “[r]iveting, heartbreaking and extraordinary for both its empathetic gaze and its clear-eyed depiction of the brutality of war” by the Star Tribune. Following the reading, Ganeshananthan will respond to audience questions.
Ganeshananthan will present her reading on Monday, June 26 in the East Library of Reid Castle at Manhattanville College at 4:45pm, with a reception to precede at 4pm. This reading is free and open to the public. In addition to acting as the Keynote Reader, Ganeshananthan will also teach a craft course for those enrolled in Summer Writers’ Week. To learn more about Summer Writers’ Week or the MFA in Creative Writing at Manhattanville, contact MFA@mville.edu.
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