V. V. Ganeshananthan

Who is V. V. Ganeshananthan?

V.V. Ganeshananthan is a Sri Lankan American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist.

Ganeshananthan is the author of Love Marriage, a novel set in Sri Lanka and North America, which was published by Random House in April 2008. Love Marriage was named one of the Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008 and appeared on the longlist for the Orange Prize. It was also selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Ganeshananthan began the novel as part of her senior thesis at Harvard University under the direction of Jamaica Kincaid. In a series of vignettes, Ganeshananthan's novel chronicles how Sri Lankan politics have affected and continue to affect a particular family. Its narrator, Yalini, is a young woman born to Sri Lankan parents in New York on July 23, 1983—the same day as one of the most violent episodes in the Sri Lankan Civil War, Black July. The novel follows Yalini and her family from suburban America to Toronto, where they reunite with an uncle who has left Sri Lanka after a life of militancy with the Tamil Tigers.

V.V. Ganeshananthan's work has appeared in many leading newspapers and journals, including Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. She is a past vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and now serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, as well as on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. She graduated from Harvard College in 2002, and later earned her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 2005. In 2007, she earned another master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. She is currently the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.