Gurnaik Johal on maximalist fiction, ecological anxiety and his debut novel, Saraswati

On this episode of The London Magazine Podcast, we speak to short story writer and novelist Gurnaik Johal. Gurnaik’s 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize, and his debut novel, Saraswati, is out now with Serpent’s Tail.

In the episode, we discuss maximalism in the novel, the Indian diaspora and the difficulty of writing about current events – ‘this is where I say to any budding writers out there: write historical fiction!’

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