Month: June 2024

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Women’s Prize Fiction & Nonfiction Winners 2024

The 29th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced from the shortlist of six novels and on the same evening the inaugural winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction from the shortlist of six books.

2024 Fiction Winner

The Women’s Prize for Fiction was won by American author, V. V. Ganeshananthan, for her deeply moving, powerful second novel, Brotherless Night (my review), which depicts a family fractured by the Sri Lankan civil war.

‘Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war. In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction.’ Monica Ali, CHAIR OF JUDGES FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

2024 NonFiction Winner

The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to Canadian bestselling writer, global activist and film-maker, Naomi Klein, for Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World; her urgent, illuminating examination of our polarised society.

‘This brilliant and layered analysis demonstrates humour, insight and expertise. Klein’s writing is both deeply personal and impressively expansive. Doppelganger is a courageous, humane and optimistic call-to-arms that moves us beyond black and white, beyond Right and Left, inviting us instead to embrace the spaces in between.’ Professor Suzzanah Lipscomb, CHAIR OF JUDGES FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

Further Reading

The Guardian Article: Judges praised Klein’s Doppelganger for its ‘courageous’ study of truth in politics and called Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night a ‘masterpiece’ of historical fiction by Lucy Knight

Have you read either of these books? Let us know what you thought of them in the comments below.

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Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

I became aware of Brotherless Night when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, the winner of which will be announced at 6.45pm GMT on June 13th, 2024.

When I read that it was about a young woman in Sri Lanka, in the time of approaching civil war, I recalled reading Nayomi Munaweera’s excellent Island of a Thousand Mirrors (my review here), a book about families and divisions, as well as belonging – how human beings continue to perpetuate separation and difference and make it dangerous, fearful and forbidden to pursue union and friendship, due to backgrounds and ethnic differences. Two families from different ethnic origins, living up and downstairs from each other…and so the story will unfold, as another generation is compromised.

Long simmering ethnic tensions and perceptions of injustice against the government lead to a civil war that pitted one group of people against the other, Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamil.

A Family and A Country Set to Lose

Sri Lanka civil war 1981 -1989 a sister who wants to become a doctor, four brother, Tamil militant recruiters, governments using ethnic differences to punish

Brotherless Night is narrated from the perspective of Sashi, from 1981-1989, the long, tumultuous, violent years of the civil war, fought between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamil separatist groups (bookended by chapters set in New York 2009).

It is mainly set in the city of Jaffna, where the young protagonist of a Tamil family lives, with some chapters set in the capital Colombo.

At sixteen, Sashi wants to become a doctor like her older brother. She has four brothers, all with different ambitions, three older and one younger. Their father Appa, a government surveyor, is travelling and rarely at home unless given leave.

The story opens when one of their friends K, hears Sashi’s screams as she spills hot water on herself and drops his bicycle and comes inside and tends to her burn. He is in her third brother Seelan’s class, also destined for medical school. His life will take a different direction, becoming further entwined with hers and her brothers.

Awakening to Irreparable Adult Conflict

The novel traces the beginnings of their pursuit of their dreams and the slow unravelling as the country erupts and young Tamil men are both recruited and sometimes snatched to join “the cause”.

A book sat on her brother’s shelf, an old bestseller about the 1958 anti-Tamil riots, one he read after being present at an international conference on Tamil language and culture where police had fired into the audience.

At sixteen I still hadn’t touched Emergency ’58 but I knew it was a brutal testimony to Sri Lanka’s willingness to slaughter its own Tamil citizens. My father’s slim, battered copy of the book had taken on the aura of something forbidden and terrifying. Did I need to read it to know that because we were ethnic minorities, Tamils were considered expendable?

It follows the effect on this particular family of the different choices people make, including the absent father and the daring mother. When two of the brothers join one of the militant groups, Sashi’s mother does everything to try and save the youngest son from becoming lost to them. When disaster arrives, she rallies ‘the mothers’ in one unforgettable episode that does make a difference, but won’t save them from what is coming.

The boys are challenged by their mother on a rare visit home, but are unable to provide responses to her unanswerable questions.

The Twisted Turns of Stunted Dreams

It is about the disruption of the dreams and the way they can swerve when disasters occur; about the effect on families and youth of political ideologies and both the difficulty and dangers of resisting; the futility of judgement, of regret.

I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?”

How to Survive

Perhaps education is one of the few ways that youth can escape a world in turmoil, but even that is no guarantee. So many have little choice or are made to choose between life and death, no choice at all.

Stories that involve families, their experiences, their losses, their small wins, their deep hurts, their bravery and failures perhaps tell us more than what media news stories depict, where money, power and political influence dictate. The lives of families, of mothers and sons and daughters come from the heart, from a desire to want them to survive and thrive.

Thoroughly researched and humanely presented, while not holding back from expressing its fury, this novel will make many readers grateful for the simplicity of their own lives and realise the ease with which they are able to pursue it and the banality of our own carefree decision-making, compared to the complicated conflict too many today are born into.

Highly Recommended.

“I was interested in writing about the gray space between militarized societies and questions of choice and coercion,” V.V. Ganeshananthan, in an interview with Here & Now‘s Deepa Fernandes

Further Reading

wbur Interview: ‘Brotherless Night’ explores Sri Lanka’s civil war through stories of family by Deepa Fernandes

NPR: ‘Brotherless Night,’ an ambitious novel about Sri Lankan civil war, wins $150K Carol Shields prize

The Guardian: Brotherless Night by V.V Ganeshananthan review – heartbreak in war-torn Sri Lanka by Yagnishsing Dawoor – excerpt below.

The novel has the intimacy of a memoir, the urgency of reportage, and the sweep and scale of the epic. It occasionally employs the second person to address the reader. In this, it sits somewhere between plea and testimony. And while the revelations are distressing, the narration itself is buoyed up by a rare and robust emotional force. Ganeshananthan’s prose is rich, eloquent, utterly unsparing. “The war,” Sashi tells us, “offered us only tight quarters.”

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà tr. Mara Faye Lethem

Early in May, I went with my son to Barcelona to meet up with my brother who was celebrating a significant birthday.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a novel with me translated from Catalan, although during the four days we were there, I did not spend much time reading.

I read a few chapters before I went there and was intrigued to discover a novel of multiple voices and perspectives, not just human voices, firmly rooted in Catalonia culture.

While the first three days were in the city, I felt drawn towards the mountains and so we spent a day in nearby Montserrat.

When Lightning Strikes

Photo M.Soetebier Pexels.com

When I sing, Mountains Dance is set near a village high in the Pyrenees. It is a lyrical, mind-expanding work, littered with references to the folklore and history of Catalonia that brings alive, and gives voice to, every aspect of life within its unique biosphere.

The first chapter is entitled Lightning and I cannot be sure that it is lightning that speaks; perhaps it is the many facets of the storm that narrates. However, it is lightning that wreaks devastation and change on the community that we will then slowly be introduced to, over the following chapters.

After our arrival all was stillness and pressure, and we forced the thin air down to bedrock, then let loose the first thunderclap. Bang! A reprieve. And the coiled snails shuddered in their secluded homes, godless and without a prayer, knowing that if they didn’t drown, they would emerge redeemed to breathe the dampness in. And then we poured water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty thunderclap resounded inside the chest cavity of every beast.

Navigating Loss, Celebrating Survival

A man named Domènec, a husband and father of two children, is outside when the storm breaks. He is in the middle of rescuing a calf whose tail is caught in a jumble of wires, carrying a small load of black chanterelles (Trumpet of Death) he has foraged. In saving the life of one, nature then takes another, in an instant.

And when it was clear we were done, the birds hopped out onto branches and sang the song of survivors, their little stomachs filled with mosquitoes, yet bristling and furious with us. They had little to complain about, as we hadn’t even hailed, we’d rained just enough to kill a man and a handful of snails. We’d barely knocked down any nests and hadn’t flooded a single field.

Ghosts of the Past Acting on the Present

A Catalan novel in translation, book cover set against the mountains of Montserrat

The four women who witnessed it approached him, then left him, gathering the soaking mushrooms he had dropped, women who made unguents and elixirs and all the other wicked things that witches do.

The death of the man sets off a catalyst of consequences for those left behind, his grieving wife, his newborn son, his neighbours.

I don’t know what hurts more: thinking only of the good memories and giving in to the piercing longing that never lets up, that intoxicates the soul, or bathing in the stream of thought that lead me to sad memories, the dark and cloudy ones that choke my heart and leave me feeling even more orphaned at the thought that my husband was not that all the angel I held him up to be.

Their voices are presented individually, then as the narrative moves along, the interconnectedness of this polyphonic world becomes increasingly apparent.

A Polyphonic Narrative

Irene Solà channels the unique voices of every living (or previously living) being: the lightning bolts, roe deer, mountains, the ghosts of civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers, with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain.

The construction is non-linear, the voices fragmentary, but the threads of story rise up through the pages, like those black chanterelles from the damp forest floor.

When tragedy strikes the family a second time, the sister is forced to face life’s struggles and joys alone. A chorus of voices bears witness to all that passes, and the savage beauty of the natural environment, demonstrating aloneness as a state of human mind and not a reality.

Here, the voice of the black chanterelles:

The wild boar came, dark mouth, wet teeth, hot air, fat tongue. The boar came and ripped us out. A man came and ripped us out. The lightning came and killed the man. The women came and gathered us up. The women came and cooked us. The children came. The rabbits came. And the roe-deer. More men came and they carried baskets. Men and women came and they carried knives.

There is no grief if there is no death. There is no pain if the pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is memory and knowledge and life. There is no pain if you’re a mushroom! Rain fell and we grew plump. The rain stopped and we grew thirsty. Hidden, out of sight, waiting for the cool night. The dry days came and we disappeared. The cool night came, and we grew. Full. Full of all the things. Full of knowledge and wisdom and spores. Spores fly like ladybugs. Spores are daughters and mothers and sisters, all at once.

Narrative Threads, Seeds, Spores, Growth and Healing

Sometimes the text reads like a story and other times like a hallucinatory dream, with a hidden message. Something of a puzzle, the various parts that make up this ecosystem, this community, the human and non-human. It is like imagining that the mountain and the trees really do bear witness to all and if they could share what they have witnessed, it would be something like this.

It requires slow reading and perseverance, as it takes a little while for the voices to become apparent and for the reader to accept that the human voices are not given the right to dominate the narrative. We are able to see and comprehend the wider picture if we have the patience to persevere.

Highly Recommended travel companion if visiting Catalonia.

Further Reading

Guardian Review: the mushroom’s tale – Animals, ghosts, humans, mountains and clouds share the narrative in this playful, deeply felt portrait of Catalonia and its people by Christopher Shrimpton

Granta: In Conversation: Eva Baltasar & Irene Solà – ‘The tide carries my books from my head to a place that is no longer mine.’ The authors discuss friendship, the sea and finishing their novels. March 2022.

Author, Irene Solà

Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, the Documenta Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize, and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery.

By interlacing art and literature, Irene Solà’s work investigates the construction, uses and possibilities of narrative and storytelling, from the historical and popular contexts to the more contemporary.