Padma Viswanathan is a novelist, playwright, journalist and translator who was born in Edmonton, Alberta. Viswanathan received an MA in Creative Writing in 2004 from Johns Hopkins University where her thesis was entitled Rooftop, Promenade. She also has an MFA from the University of Arizona. She now lives in Arkansas and is an Associate Professor in fiction-writing and literature in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville. Viswanathan recently published her literary memoir Like Every Form of Love published by 7.13 Books in 2024.
Fiction
The Charterhouse of Padma
David R. Godine, Publisher,2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she’s writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she’s married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life’s trajectory. In the widening gulf between who she is and who she thought she might be, she imagines a double, someone very like her, but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun…
Now we meet another “P”: a novelist. She’s married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It’s a second marriage—her first fell apart when she came upon a secret concealed by her then-husband. This P is exhausted and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by her husband’s dubious responses to her ambitions. Then the pandemic falls and her new novel falters, along with everything else she (and everyone else) had planned. In this new stillness, though, she starts to see her marriage differently. And, unexpectedly, she begins an essay, about her favorite color: chartreuse.
The Charterhouse of Padma is full of delicious surprises, revelations, and sharply observed truths about what is to be brown, a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. Exhilarating, electrifying, charged with incisive intellect and humor, this is a novel for anyone who ever wondered how, or if, they ever chose the thing they love.
Fiction
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2014.
PS8643 .I89 E94 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis
In 2004, almost twenty years after the fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver, two suspects –finally–are on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, comes back to do a “study of comparative grief,” interviewing people who have lost loved ones in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Soon, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their secrets. This surprising emotional connection sparks him to confront his own losses. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.
Awards and Honours
2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize (Finalist)
Fiction
The Toss of a Lemon
Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2008.
PS8643 .I89 L44 2009
Publisher’s Synopsis
Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as the [Indian] subcontinent moves through sixty years of intense social and political change. At the novel’s heart is Sivakami, a captivating girl-child married at ten to an astrologer and village healer who is drawn to her despite his horoscope, which foretells an early death–depending on how the stars align when their children are born. All is safe with their daughter’s birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum, fulfills the prophecy …
Awards and Honours
2009 Commonwealth Book Prize –Best First Book–Canada and Caribbean Region (Shortlisted)
2008 Amazon.ca First Novel Award (Finalist)
Anthology (Short stories)
Her Mother’s Ashes 3: Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States
Viswanathan, Padma. “The Wild Unknown Country.” In Her Mother’s Ashes 3, edited by Nurjehan Aziz. Toronto: TSAR, 2009, [75]-78.
Anthology (Drama)
“House of Sacred Cows”
In Ethnicities: Plays From the New West, ed. Anne Nothof. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1999.
Links
Padma Viswanathan personal website
Publisher Godine
Publisher Random House of Canada
Publisher NeWest Press