Collegiate Affiliation

V. V. Ganeshananthan, also known as Sugi, is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, and the 2023 Asian Prize; a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has been visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. Photo by Sophia Mayrhofer.

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • B.A.: English, Harvard College, 2002
  • M.F.A.: Fiction, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2005
  • M.A.: Arts & Culture Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 2007

Specialties

  • creative writing (fiction, nonfiction)
  • contemporary fiction
  • journalism
  • historical fiction
  • political fiction
  • reviewing
  • arts journalism
  • media criticism