My grandmother’s name was Meenakshi. Not Minnie. Not Meena — though people tried, constantly, to make it Meena, as if the second syllable were an ornament rather than a load-bearing wall. Meenakshi. Four syllables that held a temple in Madurai, a goddess with fish-shaped eyes, a river my grandmother crossed once and remembered for the rest of her life. When she signed forms at the bank in Chennai, clerks wrote Meenaksi and she corrected them with the patience of someone who had been correcting people for decades. The correction was not about spelling. It was about refusing to become smaller.
I think about her every time I open a translated novel and meet a character whose name has been thinned for me.
Names in fiction are never just labels. In translated and diasporic literature, they are geography, ancestry, caste, religion, the particular river someone’s grandmother drew water from. They are the sound a parent made when they first held a child and tried to hold the whole world’s hope in a single utterance. When a name travels across a language barrier — from Tamil to English, from Italian to English, from Bengali to French to English — something bends. Sometimes the bend is gentle. Sometimes it is a quiet erasure, and the reader doesn’t even know what was lost.
The Name That Arrived Smaller Than It Left
The first time I noticed this grief in print, I was reading a translated edition of Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman. The Tamil original gives its protagonist a name that carries the weight of an entire community’s longing — a childless woman in a village where fertility is identity, where your name is inseparable from what your body has or hasn’t produced. The English translation, published by Penguin India, handles this with extraordinary care, but there were moments where I could feel the seam. Not because the translator was careless — far from it — but because English has no register for what a Tamil name does when someone whispers it at dusk in a Kongu Nadu village. The sound is different. The air around the name is different.
I remember sitting on my couch in Toronto, a city that was twenty centimetres into a January snowfall, reading a passage where a character’s name appeared in English and feeling the strangest sensation: I could hear the Tamil version of the name in my head, and the English version on the page, and they were not the same person. The translation was accurate. The name was correct. But the name had been placed in a different room, and the room changed it.
This is not a complaint about translators. Translators are the most generous readers literature has. They sit with a text for years, sometimes, holding each word up to the light and turning it until it catches. The problem is structural: names carry acoustics, and acoustics don’t translate. A name like Karunakaran — five syllables, each one a footstep — becomes something different when an English reader’s eye skips across it. The reader isn’t lazy. The reader simply doesn’t have the ear for it. And the novelist knew, when they chose that name, that every syllable mattered.
What Gets Shortened, and What Gets Lost in the Shortening
I’ve been thinking about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian-era work, specifically Whereabouts, her translation of her own Italian novel. Lahiri is a writer who has spent her entire career thinking about names — her own included. She has written about the experience of having a name that Americans mispronounced and Indians shortened, of being Jhumpa in one world and something else in another. In Whereabouts, the protagonist has no name at all. I don’t think this is accidental. I think Lahiri reached a point where she understood that naming is a political act, and she chose, for that particular book, to refuse the act entirely. The unnamed woman moves through an unnamed Italian city, and the absence of a name becomes its own kind of presence.
But most novelists don’t have that option. Most novelists must name, and the naming is where the book’s emotional architecture either holds or collapses.
I think about the debut novelists I’ve been reading this year — writers from Sri Lanka, from Bangladesh, from the Tamil diaspora in Toronto and London — whose characters carry names that resist easy pronunciation. Vahni. Thuvarakan. Ishrat. Shanthi. These names are not difficult. They are simply unfamiliar to certain readers, and unfamiliarity is not the same as difficulty, though publishing often treats them as synonymous.
There’s a particular moment I keep returning to. I was reading a debut novel by a young Sri Lankan Tamil writer — I won’t name the book, because this isn’t a review, it’s a reflection — and the protagonist’s name had been shortened in the English edition. Not by the author. By the editorial process. The name had been shortened to something more pronounceable for a Western readership, and there was a translator’s note explaining the decision. The note was respectful. The reasoning was practical. And I sat there with the book in my lap and felt a grief I couldn’t immediately name.
It was the grief of watching someone become smaller so that someone else could say their name without stumbling. The grief of accommodation. The grief of a door that has been made narrower so that a guest can walk through it without turning sideways — except the guest was never asked whether they wanted to enter at all.
The Intimacy of Learning to Say a Name
But here is the other side of it, the side that gives me hope.
I’ve watched readers in my Toronto book club — women who grew up in Brampton and North York and Mississauga, women whose parents came from Lahore and Lagos and St. Lucia — lean across a table and ask, genuinely, how do you say her name? Not the character’s name. The author’s name. The translator’s name. They want to get it right. They stumble. They try again. They laugh at themselves and try a third time. And when they finally say it correctly, there is a small, private joy in the room — the joy of having honoured someone’s full self.
This is what I want to say about names in fiction: the unfamiliarity is not a barrier. It is an invitation. The name that makes you slow down is the name that is doing its work. When a reader pauses over Karunakaran or Thuvarakan or Meenakshi, the pause is not a failure of reading. It is reading, at its most attentive. It is the reader’s body learning the shape of a sound that belongs to a world they haven’t lived in. That learning is intimacy. That learning is the whole point.
I’ve started keeping a list of names from translated fiction that stopped me. Not because they were beautiful — though many were — but because they asked me to change shape in order to hold them. Anosh from a Pakistani novel. Kavitha from a Sri Lankan one. A character named Sálima in a French translation of an Arabic novel, where the accent over the a was the translator’s insistence that this name not be flattened into Salima, that the sound mattered, that the reader could learn to hold the difference.
How Novelists Choose Names: A Craft That Takes Months
So how do novelists actually choose names? This is the question I’ve been sitting with, partly because I’m a reader who has always been fascinated by the architecture of fiction, and partly because I’ve been in conversation with emerging writers in my Toronto writing community — people in their thirties and forties, many of them diasporic, many of them writing their first novels — who are grappling with this right now.
The naming process, for serious novelists, is not casual. It is not a moment of inspiration in the shower. It is months of research, trial, rejection, and revision. I’ve spoken with writers who have spent longer on a single character’s name than on an entire chapter. And when I ask them why, they say versions of the same thing: because the name is the first thing the reader encounters, and if it’s wrong, nothing else holds.
One writer in my community — a Tamil-Canadian woman writing a novel set partly in Jaffna and partly in Mississauga — told me she spent four months on her protagonist’s name. She wanted a name that would feel authentic to a Jaffna Tamil family of a particular generation and class, a name that would carry the specific grief of the Tamil diaspora without announcing it. She read naming guides. She called her aunt. She looked at school registers from the 1970s. She tried eleven names and discarded ten. The eleventh one held.
Another writer, a man from Kolkata now living in Scarborough, told me he chose his protagonist’s name by walking through a cemetery in his neighbourhood. He wasn’t looking for names, exactly. He was looking for the feeling a name leaves behind when the person who carried it is gone. He found it on a headstone dated 1973. He changed one letter, and the name became his character’s.
These stories are not unusual. They are the ordinary, invisible labour of fiction. Naming is where the novel’s emotional logic begins. A wrong name can collapse a novel’s architecture — not because readers will notice the name, but because the character will never feel real enough to carry the story’s weight. The novelist knows this in their body, even when they can’t articulate it. The name is the foundation, and you can’t build on a foundation that hasn’t been poured.
When the Name Resists Easy Pronunciation
For writers working across languages — diasporic writers, translated writers, writers whose characters exist in cultural contexts the writer is reaching toward rather than born into — the naming process is even more loaded. The name has to be authentic to the character’s world, legible to the intended reader, and honest about the distance between those two things. Sometimes there is no name that satisfies all three requirements, and the novelist has to choose which requirement to honour.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the broader conversation in the writing community about when and how writers may use practical tools in their creative process. The Authors Guild has published guidance for writers navigating AI-assisted tools, and what strikes me about their framework is the emphasis on a writer’s original voice and creativity as the defining elements of their work — a principle that extends, I think, to the deeply personal act of naming characters. The Guild’s position is nuanced: they acknowledge that writers are experimenting with various tools while also insisting that the standards of the profession, and the preservation of human voices, must be maintained. This resonates with what I see in my own writing community. The question isn’t whether to use tools. The question is whether the tool serves the character or replaces the writer’s relationship with them.
Some emerging writers, when they are first sketching a character who exists outside their own cultural lexicon, turn to a careful character name generator from Unsloppy as a starting point for research rather than a final answer. I’ve seen this done well: a writer who is drafting a novel set in a Tamil Muslim community in Toronto uses a generator to surface naming conventions they hadn’t encountered, then takes those names to community members and asks, does this feel right? The generator is a door, not a destination. The real naming happens in the conversation that follows.
Other writers I know use Reedsy’s character name generator, which draws from a database spanning dozens of languages and cultural traditions and includes name meanings alongside each result. The tool explicitly frames its output as a starting point — many writers use it early in drafting and then adapt names as the story develops, which mirrors what I see in practice. The generator is useful not because it produces the right name, but because it produces a field of possibility. The writer then does what generators cannot: they listen to the names, test them against the character they’re building, feel whether the name belongs in the mouth of the person they’re creating.
This is the crucial distinction. A generator can offer options. It cannot offer the months of sitting with a name, testing it against weather and food and the way a character’s mother would shorten it in anger. It cannot know that Karunakaran becomes Karu at home and Anna to his younger sister and sir at the office and something else entirely in the memory of a woman who loved him at twenty. That layering — the name’s life across contexts — is the novelist’s work. No tool can do it. But a tool can help a writer begin, especially when the writer is reaching across a cultural boundary they haven’t lived inside.
The Name as the Novel’s First Sentence
I’ve come to think of a character’s name as the novel’s true first sentence. The printed first sentence is what the reader reads first, but the name is what the reader holds first. The name is the hook that goes into the heart, not the eye. And when a name is chosen with the kind of attention I’ve been describing — months of research, community consultation, the willingness to discard and begin again — the reader feels it, even if they can’t articulate why. The character arrives fully formed. The reader trusts them. The story can begin.
When a name is chosen carelessly, the reader also feels it, though they may name the feeling differently. They might say the character felt flat. They might say they couldn’t connect. They might say the book didn’t hold them, when what didn’t hold was the name, and everything built on it shifted.
This is why I pay attention to names when I read translated fiction. Not to judge the translator — translators do work most readers can’t imagine — but to notice what the name carries and what it has been asked to leave behind. Sometimes the leaving is necessary. Sometimes the English reader simply cannot hold four syllables and a river and a goddess and a grandmother all at once, and the translator makes the agonizing choice to carry the meaning while lightening the sound. That choice is craft, not failure.
But sometimes the leaving is unnecessary. Sometimes a publisher shortens a name because they underestimate the reader. They believe — and this is a belief, not a fact — that Western readers will not persist through an unfamiliar name. They are wrong. I have watched readers persist through names that took them three attempts to pronounce, and I have watched those readers come out the other side changed. Not because the name was easy. Because the name was real.
What I Want to Say to the Reader Who Stumbles
If you are reading a novel and you stumble over a character’s name, I want to say this to you: the stumble is not a flaw in your reading. It is the reading. You are learning the shape of a sound that belongs to a world you are entering. Take your time. Say the name aloud. Say it wrong, and then say it again. The name doesn’t need you to be perfect. It needs you to be present.
And if you are a writer choosing a name for a character who lives in a world you’re reaching toward — a world you haven’t inhabited but are trying to honour — take the time. Use whatever tools help you begin. Then put the tools down and sit with the name. Say it in different rooms. Say it at different times of day. Ask someone from that world whether the name feels true. Listen to the answer. Change the name if you need to. Change it again. The months you spend on this are not wasted. They are the foundation of everything that follows.
A name is the first gift a novelist gives a character. It should be given the way all real gifts are given — with attention, with humility, and with the knowledge that the recipient will carry it for the rest of their life.
My grandmother’s name was Meenakshi. She carried it for ninety-one years. She never let anyone make it smaller. I think about this when I read, and I think about it when I write, and I think about it now, as the snow falls in Toronto and I open another translated novel and meet another name I want to learn to hold.
— Priya