18 February 2025

An Afternoon with Gurnaik Johal

Join author Gurnaik Johal, in conversation with Wasafiri’s Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal, to discuss the short story form in relation to questions of literary value, readership, and prize culture.

Winner of the 2023 Somerset Maugham Award for his debut short story collection We Move (2022), author Gurnaik Johal with be in conversation with Wasafiri’s Editor & Publishing Director Sana Goyal on the short story form. Literary prizes have tended to reward and celebrate Global South and racially minoritised British authors who use ‘long forms’, typically the novel. This event will explore the writing, marketing, and reception of Gurnaik’s short story collection – which charts the intersecting lives of a cast of British South Asian characters in West London – and ask why short forms matter in a landscape dominated by the novel.

This public event is part of the ‘Short Forms in the Global Literary Marketplace’ symposium, co-organised by Wasafiri Associate Editor Rehana Ahmed and Shital Pravinchandra.

When: Monday, 7 April, 2025, 4.30-5.30pm
Where: BLOC Theatre, ArtsOne, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London

Tickets: From £8, concessions and subsidised tickets available, booking required.

Purchase your ticket here.

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London. He was shortlisted for The Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize in 2018 and graduated from The University of Manchester in 2019. Gurnaik’s iconic London debut collection of stories, We Move, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2022. We Move was the Winner of the 2023 Somerset Maugham Award, Winner of the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award, a Guardian Book of the Year, and a Hindustan Times Book of the Year. Saraswati, forthcoming in summer 2025, is his debut novel.

Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.