Scotiabank Giller Prize Spotlight: Menaka Raman-Wilms
September 20, 2023
Menaka Raman-Wilms’s novel The Rooftop Garden has been longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Menaka Raman-Wilms is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. She’s the host of The Decibel, the daily news podcast from The Globe and Mail. Previously, she was a parliamentary reporter for The Globe and Mail and an associate producer at CBC Radio One. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Toronto and a masters in journalism from Carleton University. She’s also a classically trained singer. For several years, Menaka reviewed books for the Ottawa Review of Books, and has moderated panel discussions at Ottawa’s Prose in the Park literary festival. In 2019, Menaka’s story “Black Coffee” was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. She received the youth award at the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story in 2016, and won Room Magazine’s 2012 fiction contest. Her work has also been published in Broken Pencil Magazine and Acta Victoriana.
What inspired you to write The Rooftop Garden?
I began to think about The Rooftop Garden when I was living in Berlin in 2015. There were a lot of things going on in that part of Europe that year: refugees coming into Germany, a terrorist attack in Paris, and rising tensions between people as a result. These tensions eventually made their way into the novel in different forms. I was also inspired by the natural spaces I encountered in Berlin. As a result of the city’s history, there were lots of places where nature was growing back over places people had abandoned. My favourite was an old overgrown amusement park complete with a Ferris wheel. This idea of the natural world reclaiming cities made me wonder about an imagined world where climate change has caused this effect to an extreme extent, which was the basis for Nabila’s imaginary childhood game in the novel.
What do you hope readers take away from The Rooftop Garden?
I hope The Rooftop Garden encourages readers to think about how seemingly simple things in our lives can set us on different paths for our future. I also hope people think about how climate change is not only affecting our physical world, but our mental and emotional health as well.
Where is your favourite place to write? What is your process?
My favourite place to write is outdoors. On warm days, I like to write on the patio table, or at an outdoor café. This summer I even wrote in a park by my house, sitting on a picnic blanket. During the colder months I of course have to write indoors, but I at least try to find a spot next to the window so I can get some good sunlight.
Is there an activity you do to help inspire writing?
Going for a walk always helps inspire my writing. It’s both a simple way for me to observe the world while also having the space to think about ideas. I usually try to walk through a local park, or at least through a route with lots of trees. Getting out for a bit of exercise in nature always helps me figure things out.
What’s a book you recommend others read and why?
A book I’d recommend others read is Burr by Brooke Lockyer. It’s set in small-town Southern Ontario and follows Jane, who’s dealing with the death of her recently deceased father, as well as other individuals in the town also working through similar emotions. I found the novel captivating. There’s a bit of magic in it, also a darkness that lurks at the edges, and it left me thinking about it long after I finished reading it.