Ganeshananthan: My inspiration for the book was a piece of research that I found after a trip to Sri Lanka. Can you tell me about your inspiration for the book? Hannah Karau: First off, I want to say congratulations! Your historical fiction novel Brotherless Night came out on January 3rd and has been receiving a lot of positive attention. She shared some interesting behind-the-scenes information about the book in this interview: Ganeshananthan’s novel Brotherless Night, a story about a young woman’s part and experience in the Sri Lankan civil war, was published this January.

She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. She 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. 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. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications.Ī former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she 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. Ganeshananthan (she/her) 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.

Brotherless night book