Saraswati

The award-winning writer will be speaking to Professor Preti Taneja, Director Newcastle University’s Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA), as part the festival which celebrates South Asian culture and arts across the North East.

Saraswati, which was named an Observer Debut Novel for 2025, is also shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstone's Debut Fiction Prize. It tells the story of Satnam who returns to his ancestral village in Punjab for his grandmother’s funeral, to find water in a long dry well behind her house. Could the fabled Saraswati river have returned? This discovery sparks a plan to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks. Adrift from his job, girlfriend, and flat in London, Satnam is drawn into the upheaval unfolding around him.
 
Brimming with love, lust, violence and loss, Saraswati reveals buried ties between six relatives across the globe and explores the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands, and each other.

Professor Taneja, who is the acclaimed and award-winning author of the novel We That Are Young  and the non-fiction Aftermath, said: “Saraswati is a once-in-a-generation novel. Visionary, fresh, ambitious and epic, it will thrill and inspire readers of all ages, to discover the past and future connections between humans and water, in all their many forms. I can’t wait to welcome Gurnaik to Newcastle at the start of his career, to read from and talk about the book.”

Professor Taneja will also be discussing the Saraswati with Gurnaik on BBC Radio Four ‘s Take Four Books on Sunday 20 July.

A celebration

Gurnaik Johal’s short story collection We Move (Serpent’s Tail, 2022) won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize, was a Guardian Book of the Year, and a Hindustan Times Book of the Year. He won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2022, and has since had work featured in BBC Radio 4’s Short Works series, as well as in the short fiction anthology Duets (Scratch Books, 2024). Saraswati is his first novel. 

Preti Taneja's novel, We That Are Young, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK's finest literary debut in 2018, and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski, Europe's premier award for a work of world literature. Her second book is Aftermath, a lament on the language of prison, terror, trauma and grief; it won the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 for 'literature that is fearless in ambition and execution,' and was a New Statesman Book of the Year. Preti is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.
 
Presented by GemArts, NCLA and Northern Stage, the event takes place at 6pm on Tuesday 15 July.  Tickets are available here.
 
GemArts award winning Masala Festival returns from 14th – 20th July celebrating a mix and blend of the finest South Asian Arts and Culture, packed full of performances, exhibitions, events, workshops, talks, pop ups and delicious Indian food in venues, places and spaces across the Northeast. For full Masala Festival 2025 programme visit gemarts.org.