The distinguished American writer VV Ganeshananthan has been announced as the beaming recipient of the £30,000 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her poignant and potent second book, Brotherless Night, is recognised for its compelling portrayal of a family torn apart by the devastating Sri Lankan civil war.
Concurrently, the first £30,000 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was bestowed upon the esteemed Canadian author, advocate, and cineaste Naomi Klein, in acknowledgement of her pressing, revealing scrutiny of our ideologically divided society in her work, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor also featured on the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Ganeshananthan’s inaugural novel Love Marriage had the honour of being longlisted for the Women’s Prize back in 2009. Her acclaimed book, Brotherless Night, took nearly twenty years to finish. It weaves the tale of Sashi, a young girl of sixteen with dreams of becoming a doctor, living in Jaffna during the 1980s. As the civil war tears through, two of her brothers and a childhood companion ultimately enlist in the Tamil Tigers, a militant group. She finds herself in a dilemma on how to be of assistance, and ends up serving as a medic in a makeshift hospital for the Tigers. During her time there, she befriends a dissident Tamil professor and staunch feminist who prompts her to chronicle human rights abuses as a form of passive resistance.
Through Brotherless Night, Ganeshananthan highlights the often overlooked and marginalised narratives of Tamil women, regular citizens, teachers, and students. She skilfully navigates the fraught moral terrain of violence and terrorism set against a historical context of persecution and displacement.
Monica Ali, heading the jury panel, praised Brotherless Night as a “remarkable, riveting and intensely moving novel that gives attention to the personal and large-scale calamities of the Sri Lankan civil war. Through a potent combination of complexity, moral acuity, and captivating storytelling, Ganeshananthan devises a complex array of characters, vividly conjuring the period and setting. This all contributes to making Brotherless Night an outstanding representation of historical fiction.”
Ali was joined on the judging panel by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ, Laura Dockrill, Indira Varma, and Anna Whitehouse.
Klein’s Doppelganger serves as a thorough criticism of contemporary society, particularly the world of social media. The book details the virtual world, an almost shadow realm, where the line between truth and falsehood is blurred, misinformation is rampant, and conspiracy theories are the norm. Klein skilfully highlights the strange and risky aspects of our digital age from a personal, societal, and political standpoint. Doppelganger challenges readers to reassess our current times, to shun static perceptions of each other, and to strive for a more united, all-embracing, and stable future. Klein’s detailed and well-informed work provides a glimmer of hope amid our shared crisis, while revealing how the ‘internet rabbit hole’ has intensified our political and cultural divisions.
Prof Suzannah Lipscomb, the chair of the non-fiction judges, commented: “This superb and multifaceted dissection shows humour, insight and proficiency. Klein’s writing is both highly personal and impressively wide-ranging. Doppelganger is a bold, compassionate and optimistic rallying cry that encourages us to move away from rigid dichotomies, beyond the Right and Left, and instead to appreciate the grey areas.”
Contributing to the judging panel alongside Lipscomb were Venetia La Manna, Prof Nicola Rollock, Anne Sebba, and Kamila Shamsie.