About Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswanathan’s debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in eight countries, a bestseller in three, and a finalist for the Commonwealth (Regional) First Book Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, was published in Canada in spring of 2014, and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It is forthcoming in the USA, India and Australia.

Viswanathan’s short fiction appears in various journals; her story “Transitory Cities” won the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Her plays include House of Sacred Cows and Disco Does Not Suck.

She publishes cultural journalism and reviews in such venues as Elle Canada, The National Post and The Rumpus Online. Her handwritten Letter-in-the-Mail for The Rumpus can be found in Best American Non-Required Reading 2012. She has also published several short translations of Brazilian fiction.

Canadian by birth and temperament, she now lives on a hilltop in Arkansas with her husband (the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock), children, parents and an ever-shifting array of animals.