The author V. V. Ganeshananthan has received this yr’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, for her novel Brotherless Night time. That is the second yr of the prize, which awards English-language writing by ladies and nonbinary authors. Winners of the award obtain $150,000.
Brotherless Night time facilities on a younger lady named Sashi, in 1981, who needs to grow to be a physician. However her desires get upended as her household will get swept up within the battle between the Sri Lankan authorities and the minority rebel group often called the Tamil Tigers. “I was interested in writing about the gray space between militarized societies and questions of choice and coercion,” Ganeshananthan instructed WBUR’s Right here & Now in a 2023 interview.
In a press release saying the win, the prize jury referred to as the ebook “ambitious and beautifully written,” and praised Ganeshananthan’s characters for asking readers to “consider how history is told, whom it serves, and the many truths it leaves out.”
The prize is known as after Canadian Pulitzer-Prize successful creator Carol Shields, who died in 2003. The primary novel awarded final yr was When We Had been Sisters by Fatimah Asghar. The cash awarded is greater than most literary prizes. Winners of the Pulitzer Prize, for example, obtain $15,000. On high of the cash, winners of the Carol Shields prize win a residency on the Fogo Island Inn, on the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The shortlisted books embrace Birnam Wooden by Eleanor Catton, Daughter by Claudia Dey, Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote, and A Historical past of Burning by Janika Oza. Finalists will obtain $12,500.
