Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian playwright and fiction writer. Her novel, The Toss of a Lemon (2008), takes place in South India in the first half of the twentieth century. Her plays include "House of Sacred Cows," originally produced by Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton and later published in the volume Ethnicities: Plays from the New West (1999). She has also published short stories in several American and Canadian journals, including Subtropics, New Letters, Prism International, and Malahat Review. Her story "Transitory Cities" won the 14th annual Boston Review Short-Story Contest in 2007, judged by George Saunders.

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

Education

• Viswanathan received an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2005 and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 2006.

Links

• Official site
• "Transitory Cities," short story online at Boston Review
• "The Barber Lover," short story online at AGNI Online