Women's Day: It is the nameless who deserve better endings, says Sharanya Manivannan

Sharanya Mannivannan says that most male authors have done disservice to their women characters.

Sharanya Manivannan is the author of seven books, including Mermaids in the Moonlight and Incantations over Water which she has also illustrated. She writes and illustrates fiction, poetry, children’s literature and non-fiction. She received a South Asia Laadli Award for The High Priestess Never Marries, and her books have been nominated for The Hindu Prize, The JCB Prize, The Neev Book Award, The Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize, The Tata Literature Live! First Book Award and other honours.

Read also: Women's Day special coverage

The first book you remember reading?
The first book I read entirely on my own was The Billy Goats Gruff.

Your hands-down favourite writer?
Impossible to choose one. So let me name a few, randomly and far from the only ones: Joy Harjo, Michael Ondaatje, Mary Oliver.

A genre you're partial to?
Literary fiction.

A character you wish you'd met
Aslan of C.S. Lewis' Narnia books.

An writer you want to meet on the other side
The late, great bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) or the late, great Toni Morrison -- or both.

Inside jokes or references that found their way into your writing
Many; I borrow freely from conversations and situations in my life. My short story "The High Priestess Never Marries" contains several lines of verbatim dialogue, including about "epic sex" and "the culmination of centuries of human longing" -- both said to me, which I sweetly and cheaply commemorated in prose!

As you work, you listen to
Some music, but I tend to tune it out -- I'll finish working and realise x number of tracks have gone by.

What comes first -- the picture, or the word?
The word.

The book(s) you've gifted most
Probably my picture books Mermaids In The Moonlight and The Ammuchi Puchi.

Your personal mad tea party guests
I have lots of friends who buck convention, and live far away -- I'd bring them all together.

Ever fallen in love with a character? Whom?
I've fallen in love with film characters right from when I was a child, beginning with a crush on Peter Pan (who was of course adapted by Disney from JM Barrie's book). I've also written some characters whom I wished existed not only in my head but also in my, well, bed!

If you could be a mermaid in the moonlight, you'd be...
Maybe Morveren of Cornwall, who got her happily-ever-after

A book-based movie you liked better than the bookI haven't read the novel Queen Sugar, but I love the TV series and may actually skip the book.

A female character you think an author did disservice to
Most men writing on women have done a disservice to their characters. For no reason other than that I am 36 years old, I'll pick out how Alexandre Dumas described a character in The Count Of Monte Cristo: "Madame Danglars, whose beauty was quite remarkable despite her thirty-six years..." Eyeroll, really!

A woman or girl in history you wish had got a different ending
It's the nameless and the unsung, the ones who became statistics, who most deserve better endings.

(This is a multi-part interview series with women writers.)