Ruthvika Rao's The Fertile Earth is shortlisted for the 2026 Adventure Writing Prize. 

About the Book:

In a rural Indian village, two families live on opposite sides of the social divide. Vijaya and her sister Sree belong to the wealthy landowning Deshmukh family, whose status and power are absolute. Krishna and Ranga are the sons of a widowed servant in the Deshmukh household. But Vijaya and Krishna - despite their vastly different backgrounds – have developed a secret bond.

One summer the four children set off to track down a man-eating tiger that is roaming through the jungle near their home. The hunt, and its catastrophic consequences, will link their fates forever, rippling through their lives and scattering them to different corners of India.

Years later, as armed revolts erupt across the land, Vijaya and Krishna find themselves irresistibly drawn back to one another. But this is not the country they once knew: India is changing, burning from the inside out. When the violence reaches their village, a shocking act of vengeance threatens to engulf them all.

An Interview with the Author: 

WNSF: Congratulations on being selected for the 2026 Adventure Writing Prize shortlist! What does adventure writing mean to you? Would you have considered yourself an adventure writer before being shortlisted for the Prize?

Ruthvika: My favourite novels have always been set in places entirely removed from what I know. Larger than life, passionately caring about things with which I’m utterly unfamiliar. To be a million miles away, and to care about things happening all those million miles away—that to me is reading adventurously. It is what I enjoy reading, and also what I practice in my own fiction. So it’s a huge honour to have my novel shortlisted for this prize! I’m delighted that The Fertile Earth, along with the other novels on the shortlist, will be introduced new readers!

WNSF: Us too! Are there any particular books or authors which have made a lasting impact on you? 

Ruthvika: When I’m traveling in a new city, and happen by a bookstore, I buy a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. Then I mark the last page with the date and place. I have a beaten-up paperback of Never Let Me Go I’d bought in a shop in Naples in 2018, a copy of Pale View of Hills from Mumbai. I love the fact that I’ve never not found an Ishiguro novel. I admire the subtlety, the patience, and the invisibly laid puzzle pattern of a character one must follow along till the end, and the long-lasting emotional impact of the end. Even years after I’ve read an Ishiguro novel, I find myself thinking of a character. Then I think: If you aren’t writing a novel like that, why even bother? It is absolutely thrilling to see that it can be done. Work that is simultaneously complex and simple, preoccupations that can be traced and re-traced.  

WNSF: Can you tell us about any adventurous experiences in your life? Have they influenced you as a writer or your writing?

Ruthvika: You know, when I recall an ‘adventurous experience’, it has been a time when I haven’t had a realistic sense of danger. I remember when I was 7 or 8, I was on a trip with my extended family. It was the monsoon season, and we were going too fast, in a 10-seater vehicle, in the pouring rain, on a ghat road with no guardrails. There weren’t seatbelts back then, and I remember the vehicle spinning out of control and falling into the ravine. By some stroke of luck, the wheels got stuck in the thick mud pouring down the hillside, and the vehicle precariously continued to hang on. I was by myself in the rear trunk space, looking into what lay below. How strange and otherworldly it was. Then strangers passing by on the highway stopped and tried to get us out; I kept saying I wouldn’t come out, I needed to find my shoes. I can’t find my shoes! I remember being bodily dragged out, then later, my sister and I in a series of bus stations with bare, muddy feet. Strange to think of what remains of an experience years later, what makes it into the fiction. The children in my novel look into a ravine while the rain pours down, they lose their shoes… but who knows what imagination is really made of? Adventure is experience, experience is and isn’t fiction, you never think of it that way while it’s happening to you. 

WNSF: The Librarians and Library Staff who read, reviewed and selected your book for the shortlist wanted us to ask some questions on their behalf. One said, 'I loved the four children and especially Ranga who took the blame for the tragic adventure in the forest. I found it heartbreaking, therefore, to see how he was able to behave towards the end of the novel (and ultimately punish himself for those acts). How hard is it, as the writer, to make your beloved characters behave in such ways?'

Ruthvika: The experience of writing a beloved character who breaks your heart is incredibly painful. As painful as it is to have a real person you’ve known for years break your heart. I think of the four of them often, in a bittersweet way, even years after I’ve let the book go. Ranga was the hardest one. It took me a long time to truly know him, which makes the way he acted heartbreaking, but inevitable. Ranga to me symbolizes the tenderness and the tragedy of the story.

WNSF: Another asked, 'Do you see yourself in any of your characters, or anyone you know? They felt so real as I read them.' 

Ruthvika: I honestly don’t know! Mostly my writing follows a daily routine. Wake up, do your chores, then open the door to the fiction and spend your day inside this other place. And when it is time, you close the door and come back to real life, do the cooking and the dishes and laundry and the school pickup. But then one day something happens while the door is open, a small, unexpected stroke of the pen, and the character pours life onto themself. They detach from me and become independent, and I cannot control them, I can only follow them. Every day after that, when I open the door they are already waiting on the other side, ready to live their life. It’s an inexplicable, magical experience. It makes it worth all the hard work that goes into novel writing. 

WNSF: One asked, 'Your beautiful novel had exquisite descriptions of India: the village of Irumi, the Nallamala Forest, the cities of South India. I felt completely transported. I think you live in America now, but did you travel to India for inspiration when you were writing the novel, or did you write the settings based on memories or photographs?'

Ruthvika: I moved to America after college, but I never really left. It’s more truthful to say that I have two homes. I spend my winters in Hyderabad. I remember a school field trip to the Nallamala forest, and my parents were hesitant to send me because it was “a Naxalite area.” The conflict is part of the lexicon when one is from the Telangana region. “Oh, so and so was killed by Naxalites” or “so and so became a Naxalite” were things commonly said. The violence of the past is treated as being part of the fabric of life, so while the early draft was written in isolation, purely from imagination and memory, over the course of the many revisions over the years, I traveled back and forth between India and America, which put a fine point on everything I was observing and retaining; for years, every experience felt sieved for the needs of the book. Memories certainly played a huge part, but it’s almost impossible to tell memories apart from imagination.

WNSF: Finally, one wanted to know: 'The reader is transported back to a period of political unrest in post-independent India where religion, class and caste vie with communism and democracy. How did you research this time?'

Ruthvika: There was an enormous, daunting amount of research. I discovered that I have a natural comfort with certain aspects of research, such as archival newspapers and oral histories, but most luckily, I stumbled across this obscure book containing folk songs from that time period. These were unattributed songs, labelled as being ‘captured’ at so and so village, because the singers weren’t literate, only the person hearing the songs and transcribing the lyrics was. It was like witnessing someone’s lived experience, rendered in emotional, poetic, but colloquial language. It was like leaping through time, closing the gap between the past and the present.

WNSF: Can you tell us about a particular relationship between two characters in your novel and how you made it feel genuine? 

Ruthvika: The relationship between Katya and Vijaya when they were children: there is a moment in the novel when they notice each other’s clothes, and while writing that scene, I discovered that clothing was an incredibly vital marker in the context of this novel, as much as diction, as much as the particulars of what a character observes. In that scene, they look at each other, Vijaya observes Katya’s clothing, and Katya tells Vijaya: “I think you are beautiful.” It made the relationship come to life in a genuine and truthful manner. 

WNSF: What would you say is the hardest thing about writing? And the easiest?

Ruthvika: The easiest thing about writing is to have permission to daydream all day, alone in a room. But it is also part of the job to obsesses over the minuteness of a single comma inside a 120,000 word manuscript, to assiduously read and read a single sentence all day long, to turn around paragraphs and break them and re-break them, to chip away for months on a chapter only to discover that I must throw it away, to start over and again, going through the motions of self-doubt and exhilaration and absolute defeat. It is hard, and the hard parts are the best parts. I remind myself that if it were easy, it isn’t worth doing.

WNSF: Thank you so much for answering our questions, Ruthvika. And congratulations once again. 

Buy the Book: 

About the Author: 

Ruthvika Rao is from Hyderabad, India. Her debut novel, The Fertile Earth, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Chautauqua Prize, the Crossword Book Award, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Toronto. Her second novel, All Our Evenings, is forthcoming in September 2026.

What Our Reviewers Said:

"The writing in the book is, to me, exceptional. The way the author describes people, and their internal worlds, is as vivid and compelling as her descriptions of the beauty and chaos of their surroundings."

"I loved everything about this novel. The writing is strong and sensual, powerfully evocative of the landscape of India and its culture."