American writer V.V. Ganeshananthan won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction on June 13 for her novel , about a family torn apart by Sri Lanka’s long civil war.
Its sister award, the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, went to author-activist Naomi Klein for , a personal account of her plunge into the world of online misinformation. The two awards come with £30,000 ($38,000) each in prize money. Both winners referenced the conflict-clouded international situation, at a time when the arts world is grappling with divisions over the Israel-Hamas war and corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Ganeshananthan’s victorious second novel, which traces an aspiring medic’s journey through the war’s brutality and moral uncertainties, took almost two decades to complete. The Sri Lankan Tamil-origin Ganeshananthan’s first novel was published in 2008, and she started in 2004. She said writing historical fiction “carefully and thoughtfully” about a traumatic conflict well within living memory that was true to people’s experience was “hard work”.
“It took such a long time because of the chorus of people it was necessary to talk to,” she said. She said that faced with conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war, “what can writing do? Hopefully push people to collective actual action.” Novelist Monica Ali, who chaired the fiction judging panel, said is “a brilliant, compelling, and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of .