Magazine

Two authors of Lankan origin longlisted for prestigious Fiction Prize

By Maura O’Connor

Two authors of Sri Lankan heritage have been longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman.

Michelle de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka but emigrated to Australia at the age of 14, was nominated for her third novel, The Lost Dog, about a middle-aged literary scholar searching the Australian bush for his dog.

V.V. Ganeshanathan

V.V. Ganeshananthan was nominated for her first novel Love Marriage (2008), which explores four generations of a Tamil family in the United States and Canada, and their relationship to Sri Lanka’s civil war as well as each other. Ganeshananthan is the daughter of Sri Lankans and grew up in Maryland.

The winner of the Orange Prize receives £30,000 and joins an impressive group of women writers who have won in previous years, including British author Zadie Smith, who won in 2006 for her novel On Beauty. Former longlist nominees have included eminent American authors Toni Morrison and Donna Tartt.

Both de Kretser’s and Ganeshananthan’s novels met with critical praise after publication. The New York Times Book Review called The Lost Dog, “That rare treasure, a perfect novel... As the plot grows darker and more complex, de Kretser’s prose gleams with sinister beauty.”

De Kretser

In a former interview, de Kretser said the book was in part motivated by her love of puzzle-solving and classic “whodunit” stories. “I think in this novel it’s not so much puzzles as secrets, basically, which are slightly different. We’re still driven by the need to find out, well, what really happened,” she said.

The San Francisco Chronicle said in Love Marriage, Ganeshananthan was, “profoundly moving. She captures the pain of exile poignantly.” Ganeshananthan attended the Galle Literary Festival in January where she participated in several panels and read from her novel. The first chapter of Love Marriage begins: “In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage.

“The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second.” The shortlist nominees will be announced on April 21, and the Orange Prize Awards Ceremony will be held on June 3.

"The Orange Prize was launched in 1996 over concern that many literary prizes didn’t recognize important women authors, and to create a non -traditional literary forum for women to both critique their peers’ work and celebrate it. All the judges of the Orange Prize are women.":

 
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