The fall 2017 Mary Ellen von der Heyden in Fiction V.V. Ganeshananthan, a journalist and fiction writer, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008). The novel, set in Sri Lanka and some of its diaspora communities, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named by the Washington Post as a best book of 2008. At the Academy, Ganeshananthan will be working on her second novel, Movement (under contract with Random House), which draws on a decade of research on the Sri Lankan civil war, as well as her experience as a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. The novel tracks its protagonist, Sashi, from her time as a young medic in northern Sri Lanka, in the late 1980s, to her career as an emergency room doctor in New York City, in 2009. As the war hurtles to a brutal conclusion, the lessons of her history move her to a questionable act of political theater.