Many Notes on the Piano: Gurnaik Johal on the Short Story and Writing Miscommunication

In April 2025, Wasafiri Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal spoke with author Gurnaik Johal at an event at Queen Mary, University of London, about the place of short stories within publishing, literary prize culture, the defiance of untranslated language, and more.  

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is your most vivid memory of reading or listening to a story – long or short – and at what point did you realise that you wanted to write stories yourself? 

I have distinct memories of reading standard escapist fiction as a kid. I didn't think about writing until university, and at that point, I was mostly engaged by short stories. I started in the standard places — think of the three Cs: Carver, Chekhov, Cheever.  

I do remember being blown away when I listened to a story, ‘Extra’, by Yiyun Li on The New Yorker Podcast. The short story form is often talked about in terms of this perfect, precise craft, which I feel often takes all the heart out of it. But Li’s story struck me emotionally as much as it did for its great sentences. So, I first listened to it, then read it, and said to myself, ‘OK, cool. I specifically want to do this’. 

If everyone's learning about Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver, where less is more, it can lead to short fiction that feels ‘spare’ and ‘concise’ — words which sound good in reviews, but sometimes take the fun out of a story.  

When did you first start writing? I believe you wrote some of the stories in your debut collection, We Move, whilst at university in Manchester, and others during an English with Creative Writing degree. Earlier, we spoke about MFAs/creative writing workshops and the ongoing debates around them. What did writing We Move within the space of the university offer you, both structurally and creatively? 

I probably wouldn't be writing without the formal education system. Before university, I didn’t know any writers or think of writing as something people do. But then, you find yourself doing an English degree, surrounded by a few writers in the faculty, and you begin to think about it – especially if there’s a creative writing element to the degree – you write a story on a deadline, submit it for workshopping like in an MFA, and find people to talk about it. I wouldn't have found people who actively read my work if I hadn't gone to university for that degree. It was also useful to skip ahead and know what to read, rather than languishing on my own. I felt like I was on an express route to reading better, in spaces where writing was taken seriously, and most importantly, I found an audience in my classmates.  

I am, of course, coming at this from an undergraduate’s perspective, so I don’t see the confines that you do. Perhaps you see a kind of movement now, stylistically, where a lot of writing coming through the MA/MFA system steers people towards a similar kind of product.

If everyone's learning about Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver, where less is more, it can lead to short fiction that feels ‘spare’ and ‘concise’ — words which sound good in reviews, but sometimes take the fun out of a story.

We Move was published in 2022, and you have a novel [Saraswati] coming out this summer. Tell us what your experience was 'breaking into' publishing: getting an agent, submitting work, being published. Did you face any challenges? 

Luckily, my actual journey to publication has been very smooth. I sent out a few stories to competitions and got an agent through them. She then sent my collection out to publishers and, I don’t know, it might have been rejected all over London — I only heard about the one ‘yes’. I knew having a short story collection as my first book would be a ‘soft launch’ as a writer compared to being a debut novelist. There's a bit more noise around that; the two are marketed differently, too. The challenge is in realising that your work as a writer isn't just about making what’s inside the book — there is a lot else at work, which is lovely too. I wasn’t under a lot of pressure to do publicity or make TikToks or anything, for example ... 

You mentioned earlier that your agent submitted some of your stories for prizes. Can you talk about the opening story, ‘Arrival’, which won the Galley Beggar Short Story Award? What was it like to win, or be nominated for, prizes early on in your career? Did prizes nurture and support you in those early stages of writing, helping you usher your debut into the world? 

Prizes bump up your name in agents’ inboxes. Sending them your work as just another submission in a pile does make it quite hard to break through. We always hear about great work that's overlooked because agents have to respond to so many emails. So, if your subject line reads, ‘Shortlisted for Blah’, it might make you stand out. The first time I met agents and got their business cards was at a prize ceremony for a work that was longlisted. It all feels quaint now, the idea of getting business cards; I don't know if that still happens ... But yes, winning prizes was useful for me — and I probably earned more from prizes than I did from my advance! 

I’m grateful to you for mentioning money. Writing takes time, and you need a stable income — not just to sustain the writing life, but also for one’s confidence. This is especially true, I imagine, when advances look vastly different when you’re debuting on the publishing landscape with a short story collection, or with an indie or small press.  

Earlier, you pointed out industry perceptions around short stories, and how they are marketed and sold. It made me think of The Observer New Review list, which is for the best debut novelists, not the best debut writers. You were on the list this year, which I found interesting because Saraswati is not your debut work. Can you speak to this in the context of what you said earlier about the short story collection being your ‘soft launch’?

Half of the writers on The Observer’s list had written and published short story collections previously. Perhaps you get two chances at it: once with the short story collection and then, after, debuting with the novel. I also think the industry is always looking for the shiny, new thing. It wants to build up debuts. Of course, what happens after is a whole different conversation: you're either a big name, or middle-list, or maybe won't be published again. So, being able to debut twice is useful.  

I probably earned more from prizes than I did from my advance! 

In terms of perceptions around short stories: when I was speaking to agents, I wanted to prove that I had a novel in me, too. They’d say, ‘Maybe write the novel and we'll revisit the short stories later.’ But I persisted. And even then, the short story collection was seen as a supplementary thing rather than the thing itself, which is interesting in itself because a lot of writers turn to short stories ...  

There are various trends around what a story should look like, or what a story written and told from marginalised or minoritised perspectives should look like. Have you had to navigate any stereotypes? I hate to use the phrase ‘burden of representation’, but I wonder if you felt like you were navigating any industry expectations, or preconceived biases, with your collection. 

I’ve worked in children's publishing, and I remember how, in 2020, the whole industry lost its head. There was suddenly a rush to ‘educate ourselves!’ [in the period following George Floyd’s murder by police in the US]. Fiction became a kind of commodity where people thought, ‘I’m going use novels to learn more about so-and-so culture or so-and-so place — and that will reflect well on me.’  

There is perhaps a greater expectation on books by people of colour to educate people. Even with a short story collection, which is otherwise spoken about for its ‘craft,’ and ‘sentence-level beauty’, my work was perceived as ‘really shining a light on a specific area of Britain’. It is doing that and I'm very proud of it, but I don't see my book as ‘trying to represent’. I’m trying to tell good stories and craft good narratives, and they happen to be about this thing, sure. I agree with both sides — it's murky. 

All the stories in We Move are set in and around Southwest London, a place you have referred to as ‘a weird blip’ in previous interviews. Can you tell us about the setting, and offering a sense of place through these stories? I suppose this is a question about how the psychogeography of the city inspired your stories, which are intergenerational and loosely interlinked. Why did you choose them over an intergenerational saga, for example? 

While writing short stories, you’re often taught to stick with one character – otherwise it's too much freight for how much you can carry – then add a second character, and so on. But when I wrote, I ended up with a wandering gaze. I realised I'm really interested in this other character, too. So, I’d write another story about them, and then those related characters lived in the same neighbourhood as well. I arrived – quite accidentally – at an interlinked web of stories in the same neighbourhood, unfolding at a similar time. It wasn't conscious; it was like making up a game when you’re a kid — you start doing something and the rules start presenting themselves as you go. I made a feature out of the setting when I realised this pattern. 

It was then that I started thinking more about short story collections centred around one place. There is one in Winesburg, Ohio [by Sherwood Anderson] which is all set in one town in America, and of course there's Dubliners, which is inspiring. Writing about Southwest London made me realise that it was not ‘normal’ for the rest of Britain — it just felt that way to me because I grew up there. In learning about the history of the place, I realised it was different.  

Southall has the highest percentage of non-white residents anywhere in the UK and has a long history of anti-racist activism, which I didn't know about growing up. For instance, Southall residents once set a pub opposite my grandmother's house on fire. It booked a Nazi band to play and shipped in skinheads from outside of the area, and people fought back. When I finished the book, my dad told me about how they broke the bricks in front of our house and threw them at us ...  

You engage with several languages in this book and often leave them untranslated on the page. It was such a highlight for me, this defiance or refusal to translate. In one of the stories, the mother pretends not to speak English when a guard at a museum tries to tell her off. In another story, there’s a sweet, comical interaction between a granddaughter and her grandmother, where the grandmother says, ‘Why no Punjabi, rani?’ And the granddaughter says, ‘Why no English, Nani?’ People often misunderstand each other and that barrier or border exists not only within the domestic space, but also in the neighbourhood, the city, and the nation ...  

I often tell my writing students that pretty much all dialogue is miscommunication. People in conversation are like at a tennis match, passing a ball to each other, often speaking at odds with each other. Instead of listening, we’re often thinking up the next smart thing to say. I just turned up the contrast on that. 

Like in that intergenerational story where the kid only speaks English and the grandmother only speaks Punjabi: I don't speak Punjabi very well and my childhood memories often involved being forced to sit in a house with people speaking a language I didn’t understand. If I were to psychoanalyse myself, I’d say maybe that's where thinking about fiction started for me — I was imagining what they were saying to each other. I think when you get people with varying access to different languages, you end up with more interior worlds. And that was fun to play with — especially the free, indirect style where I was moving from one character to another. As a reader I could do what I couldn’t as a person — shift perspectives and see from the other side. I'm interested in that kind of miscommunication. 

A character named Kenny goes to a clairvoyant, who tells him: ‘It's less about the individual cards than the story they tell as one. Think of the thread that ties the picture together’. Can you talk about curating the collection in the way that you did? What conversations did you have with your agent or editor about structuring and arranging your stories in the way that you did?  

I was influenced by those early Internet novels, where you'd start reading a section with hyperlinked parts, and you could click whichever one you wanted. It was like Wikipedia, leading you to whichever pathway you chose. Not a linear story with a beginning, middle, and an end, but one full of diffracted parts that you could piece together.  

I like the idea of a reader navigating their way through the work rather than the author saying, ‘Do it like this’. In a gallery, you largely know the route people will take even though they can walk anywhere. Similarly, this book, too, can be read in any order, but people will mainly read it in the order I ascribe to it.  

I often tell my writing students that pretty much all dialogue is miscommunication. People in conversation are like at a tennis match, passing a ball to each other, often speaking at odds with each other. 

While speaking with my editor, I had all these titles on different postcards which I kept moving around so that one story’s ending led to the beginning of another. But when I sent him an order that I was happy with, he said, ‘You've got to start with the shortest story, so the reader gets it under their belt.’ I, on the other hand, had put the longest story first, which he felt created some sort of hurdle to get over — one in which I might lose readers in the process. I think he was right; you want to ease them into it. The three interlinked chapter stories are a triptych, where you see the father's perspective in the first part, followed by the perspectives of the two daughters. However, that was originally one very long story, and I felt it was this large weight in the middle of the book. So, I revisited the characters in a different way and spread them across the book. The reader still learns that the stories are interconnected. It got more manageable, working like tent poles around which stories were structured. 

Can you tell us about your forthcoming novel?

It’s about a holy ancient river called Saraswati brought back to life by a modern-day Hindu nationalist government in India. The river disappeared thousands of years ago — but it seems the water is returning underground because the Himalayan glaciers are melting. The government invests money into this revival as part of national myth-making and tries to divert the water flowing across the border as well. I followed the thought, ‘What if this actually happens?’ and saw it to its natural end.  

In terms of structure, Saraswati has seven distinct narratives following seven different characters who share a common ancestor. But thanks to the machinations of empire, they've all ended up in different parts of the world, in different diasporas. They find their way through the story of the river. At the foreground is a family story that goes all across the world – from Kenya to Mauritius to Canada – and in the backdrop is the story of this river and global politics.  

Saraswati reads like an unravelling of a long thread, like a shared history among characters … 

The structure came quite early in the writing, and I think it creates a propulsive movement; you see every generation of a family veering off in two directions. I wanted the novel to comprise separate parts. I'd just read Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, and that novel is structured in equal parts. I folded pages of every section, and they were the same length — I don't know how she did that!  

I think Saraswati falls in a grey space. Purists like all stories in a short story collection to be their own thing. But in this novel, they are collected. I enjoyed working with something interlinked, with separate narratives that cohere into one without neatly fitting into either category. That in-between place between the two categories is my favourite to read. 

My final question is around something you said in a 2022 Guardian interview — that when you began at eighteen, you wanted to write a genuinely happy story. Can you talk about the power of stories in offering happiness, optimism, or even radical hope? Because I feel like you've done that here, with We Move ... 

When I was starting out, I’d hear this cliché: ‘Happiness writes white.’ It’s the kind of thing where you go to the pub to meet your friend and they ask, ‘How's your life?’ And you say, ‘It's good, man. Work's good. The relationship's good. Really sunny. I just got a pay rise and I'm going on holiday.’ That’s so boring to listen to! But if his partner is cheating on him and he doesn’t know — now that's interesting.  

Fiction works on conflict-driven stories, or at least that’s how it’s taught. But I wanted to do it differently. Maybe it was the teenage me, but I thought: ‘I'm going write a happy story, and they're going to figure out you can do this.’ But you can't write a fully happy story where happy characters are just happy — it's got to feel like happiness is earned, and it should be momentary for the story to land. Happy endings are tough as well, because they can feel like a cop-out.  

So, in We Move, I decided to slow down until we get to a moment of joy. It's often in the small moments — a song comes on, or a wife rests her head on her husband’s chest and things slow down. I wanted to use as many notes on the piano as I could. It couldn’t all be on the side; you've got to sort of sprinkle in a bit of this, a bit of that.  

Saraswati is published by Serpent’s Tail and is available now.