Gurnaik Johal and Sarah Hall: Writers Braving the Elements

Blending political satire with ecological parable, Gurnaik Johal’s bold, capacious debut novel Saraswati finds the lives of seven individuals transformed, as an ancient sacred river springs back to life in a rapidly changing contemporary India.

Vital and audacious, Sarah Hall’s latest novel Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force – a ferocious, mischievous wind, the subject of folklore and wonder, who has blasted the landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time. The novel also lays out the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.

Join us for an evening of readings and conversation, chaired by Caoilinn Hughes. Talking points will span geographies, generations and geological time as we examine the dependence and discord between humans and the nature that surrounds us, and the power of literature in helping us to understand our world.

Event Schedule

6:00pm: Pre-event socialising and networking
A cash bar will be available for refreshments.

6:15pm: Event begins

7:30pm: Event ends

Speakers

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Live! Prize. Its opening story won the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. Saraswati is his debut novel.

Sarah Hall has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and is the award-winning author of seven novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice – first in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and again in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.

Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel is The Alternatives, a New York Times  Editor’s Choice. She is the author of The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her short stories have won the Irish Book Awards’ Story of the Year, The Moth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Prize. She was recently an Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.