Padma Viswanathan


Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian playwright and fiction writer.

Life

She graduated from University of Alberta, and received an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 2006.
Her short stories have appeared in Subtropics, New Letters, PRISM international, Boston Review, and Malahat Review.
She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her husband, the poet/translator Geoffrey Brock, and their two children.

Awards

Her story "Transitory Cities" won the 14th annual Boston Review Short-Story Contest in 2007, judged by George Saunders.
Her novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Works

Short stories

In the introduction to her stunning first novel, Padma Viswanathan describes her grandmother’s faltering attempts to recount their family history. “This time, she started farther back,” she writes of one occasion, “with a story I’d never heard: of her own grandmother, married as a child and widowed before she was out of her teens; of that grandmother’s son, childless and embittered; and her daughter, my grandmother’s mother, victimized by her marriage.” After trips to India, enormous amounts of research, and not a little invention, the result is The Toss of a Lemon.