Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswanathan (born 1968 Nelson, British Columbia)[1] is a Canadian playwright and fiction writer.

She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with her husband, the poet/translator Geoffrey Brock, and their two children.

Her story "Transitory Cities" won the 14th annual Boston Review Short-Story Contest in 2007, judged by George Saunders.

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.