New Delhi: Indian-Canadian author and translator Padma Viswanathan has drawn global attention for her English translation of Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath. Originally written in Portuguese, the book made the International Booker Prize 2026 longlist, announced on 24 February.
This recognition marks a defining moment in Viswanathan’s career, tracking her evolution from a celebrated novelist to a vital literary bridge connecting Brazilian Portuguese literature with English-language readers.
Viswanathan has written four books, including the international bestseller The Toss of a Lemon in 2008. Her work has been shortlisted for both the PEN Centre USA Fiction Prize and Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.
“I started as a playwright, but fiction feels like my natural home — I’m primarily a novelist. I became interested in Brazil about 25 years ago, first through its music and then through its syncretic religious practices and histories. The part of India I come from, Tamil Nadu, also has a deeply syncretic history,” she said in an interview.
Body of work
Born to parents from Tamil Nadu, Viswanathan grew up in a cultural environment that shaped her work. She studied at the University of Alberta, completed her MA from Johns Hopkins University (2004), and finished an MFA at the University of Arizona (2006).
Today, she is a professor of creative writing, translation and international literature at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She lives there with her husband, poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, and their children.
Viswanathan’s career started in journalism and playwriting before turning to fiction. Her debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, established her as a compelling new voice. The novel is inspired by her family’s Brahmin history in South India and follows Sivakami, a child widow navigating caste, fate and survival across generations.
The book became a bestseller in India and several other countries. It was later shortlisted for the PEN USA Fiction Prize and highlighted Viswanathan’s interest in exploring themes of identity, inheritance and displacement.
Her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, published in 2014, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It explored grief in the aftermath of the 2008 Sri Lankan train bombings through the perspective of a psychologist.
In 2024, she published The Charterhouse of Padma, focusing on two American women uncovering secrets about their partners. And her 2023 memoir Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime combines self-reflection with true-crime investigation.
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Linguistically connected
In recent years, Viswanathan has increasingly focused on translation. Living in Arkansas, she has spoken about feeling linguistically disconnected, which pushed her to work more with Portuguese.
Her retranslation of Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo received wide praise in 2020. It was a runner-up for the UK Society of Authors’ TA First Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
She has also translated Djamila Ribeiro’s Where We Stand and is currently co-editing the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories with Daniel Hahn.
The recognition for the International Booker has also drawn attention in Indian-Canadian literary circles, where Viswanathan is often seen as a writer whose diasporic roots strengthen her global reach.
In an interview, she credited Geoffrey Brock with encouraging her to take on the retranslation of São Bernardo at a time when she feared losing fluency in Portuguese.
Brazil first captured her heart roughly 25 years ago through its music and religious traditions, elements that resonated with her own roots. She also expressed her interest in translating from Tamil in the future.
Across novels, memoirs and translations, Viswanathan’s career reflects a continuous commitment to stories that cross borders. With the International Booker longlist bringing renewed attention to her work, she has secured a place as a literary mediator connecting Brazilian writing with a wider English-speaking world.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)