Overview

GemArts Masala Festival presents Saraswati: An Observer Best Debut Novel of 2025 

Award-winning short story writer Gurnaik Johal reads from his debut novel Saraswati, in conversation with Preti Taneja. 

Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through Northern India. When Satnam returns to his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral, he’s astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. This discovery sparks a contentious 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. Johal’s magisterial debut explores the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands, and each other. 

Presented by GemArts, Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts and Northern Stage 

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. 

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 lives in Newcastle, and is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. 

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