Brannavan Gnanalingam is a novelist, freelance writer and lawyer based in Wellington. He has published eight novels, including Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlisted A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse and shortlisted Sodden Downstream and Sprigs. His sixth novel Sprigs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2020) also won the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award. Sprigs explores toxic masculinity in a New Zealand private boys’ school.

For ten years Gnanalingam contributed to the online publication The Lumière Reader during which time he covered film festivals such as Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Cannes. He has also written for The Spinoff, The New Zealand Listener, and The Dominion Post.

Slow Down You’re Here (Lawrence & Gibson, 2022), set in Auckland, New Zealand, is a pacey book full of love and desperation. Murdoch Stephens of the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective writes ‘Gnanalingam has a gift for realist fiction that is so real that it gives the reader an entirely new view on what might have been considered all too familiar’.

Brannavan’s most recent book, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (Lawrence & Gibson, 2024), casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa.

 

Links

Lawrence & Gibson publishers 

ANZRB review of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (April, 2025)

ANZL review of Slow Down You’re Here (Aug, 2022)

Radio NZ interview with the Ngaio Marsh winners (Oct, 2021)

Media announcement: Sprigs wins the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award (Oct, 2021)

Spinoff review of Sprigs (July, 2020)

Stuff.co.nz article on Brannavan and Sprigs (July, 2020)

Radio NZ interview discussing Sodden Downstream (Oct, 2017)

Radio NZ interview discussing A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (June, 2016)