iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

U.X.O is in production and ready to join its mates on the shelves. Pre-sales will be winging their way out in early September. Details of the launch to come. www.lawrenceandgibson.co.nz/product/uxo

My nine novels: Getting Under Sail (2011), You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here (2013), Credit in the Straight World (2015), A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (2016), Sodden Downstream (2017), Sprigs (2020), Slow Down, You’re Here (2022), The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (2024), and UXO (2026)

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Front cover reveal of U.X.O. - painting by Sahana Rahman. Also, pre-sales of U.X.O. are available through Lawrence & Gibson, and will be shipped out early September www.lawrenceandgibson.co.nz/product/uxo

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

New novel alert! U.X.O. is my ninth novel, set in Jaffna during the IPKF era of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1987-1990). It’s a book that looks at how we can hold people to account for war crimes when institutions and power are indifferent. Will be out later in the year through Lawrence & Gibson

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

When politicians resort to bashing immigrants

We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I don’t ever talk about work on here, but it’s been a genuine privilege to have worked on Te Kahu and Te Rua Archives New Zealand, & for this incredible new space to be open to the public in Pōneke. With Te Matapihi’s recent opening, it’s awesome to celebrate some cultural institutions in the city

Public opening of Te Kahu, the campus connecting Te Rua (National Archives) and Te Puna (the National Library)

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Awesome list of a whole bunch of international books I haven’t heard of, but will need to track down, and thank you to Pip for including Kartik Popat as one of them

Writing within a hair’s breadth of the “real” current political moment in Aotearoa/”New Zealand,” Gnanalingam gives uncensored voice to Kartik Popat—wet-dream of the political white right—a member of the model minority who hates other immigrants. Popat half-arses up to levels of power that offer him opportunities for fame and grift giving fictional life to the new New Zealand politician—selfish, ignorant and incredibly dangerous. In Gnanalingam’s hands this novel is heartbreaking and hilarious, a call to action and a reassurance in an age of misinformation that what we are seeing is what we are seeing.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

RIP Peter Watkins, an underseen master (following the BBC’s half-witted panic over The War Game). He was a brilliant and provocative director

A still from Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

And then finally a Masterclass at Tūranga (Spark Place) on a bunch of practical tips on how to fit writing in, when the rest of your life gets in the way

Is your life getting in the way of your writing? This masterclass will run through how to balance planning, research, drafting, and editing around your day-to-day life. Brannavan Gnanalingam, the author of eight novels, and full-time lawyer will share practical tips on how to balance everything.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Saturday at 12.30 at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, I’m talking about a musician that had a big impact on me, alongside Damien Wilkins, Pohlen Newbery, Claudia Jardine and Kiran Dass

Writers share a love letter to the music that moves them. Join 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction winner and member of the band the Close Readers Damien Wilkins, Brannavan Gnanalingam, Pohlen Newbery (Ngai Tūhoe, Ngāti Manunui), and Claudia Jardine as they each share a band or musician that has had an indelible impact on their lives. Be introduced to new musical gems or gain fresh perspectives on old favourites. Hosted by Kiran Dass.
With support from Main Divide

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Then I’m talking food at Tūranga (TSB Space) with Alex Casey, Nici Wickes, and Jessica Hutchings on Friday at 6.30pm

Who would you invite to your ultimate dream dinner party? Whether it’s pop culture legends, historical figures, fictional characters, or friends and family, the possibilities are endless! Food lovers Nici Wickes, Brannavan Gnanalingam and Jessica Hutchings (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Gujarati) join Alex Casey to set the scene by imagining their dream guest list, and tell us what food and drink would be on their dream menu. A joyful celebration of kai.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Folks in Ōtautahi, I’m coming down for Word Christchurch and have a bunch of events that I can’t wait for. First off, I’m talking political satire, Disgrasians stinking up the discourse in our body politic, and Kartik Popat with Nic Low at Tūranga on Friday at 2.30

With his novel The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, writer and lawyer Brannavan Gnanalingam has created a sharp satire of Wellington’s political scene and who’s actually pulling the strings. He joins Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu) for a wide-reaching conversation about political power, the changing nature of a city, thwarted artists, identity politics and democratic principles.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Why not (though ask me tomorrow and I’ll have a different list)

To Her Door - Paul Kelly
Mr Somewhere - The Apartments
The World’s a Girl - Anita Lane
Wide Open Road - The Triffids
Cattle and Cane - The Go-Betweens
Since I Left You - The Avalanches
I Touch Myself - Divinyls
Under the Milky Way - The Church
Fruits of Labour - Party Dozen
Can’t Get You out of My Head - Kylie

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Describe your favourite movie in the most misleading way possible. Ooh la la, a French ménage-à-trois

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Once again, Kartik Popat doing his best to nab a column, given this week’s ugly political machinations

I now had to diversify my output and shift away from Covid, applying a certain amnesia that also harnessed the angst. I started with
easy targets, and I’d say things like how immigrants came over here and worked hard and didn’t blame colonisation in their home countries to get on with things here, and how we didn’t need to focus on
grievance politics anymore, and how it was unfair that so much spending was going towards Māori, or I’d double-down on attacks on the trans community, because I’d come to realise that there was a whole
zombie horde out in the UK, a privileged generation of middle-class white women, desperate for victim status in spite of their economic power built on the back of the work done by the second-wavers, were
blaming trans people allegedly lurking everywhere to ensure that they
could continue to claim that they were just as much victims as other minorities, or otherwise I’d amplify accounts of white men who were being mocked or teased or losing their jobs and careers thanks to leftists (though the latter didn’t really happen, we just needed people to think that it could happen, and we’d underplay the criminal
convictions of those who were actually fired), as I had come to realise that people were desperate to be seen as the unfairly treated ones

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Oh! A fantastic review of Kartik Popat by Cybonn Ang in the new Takahē (and plenty of great stuff in the latest edition, as always)

Gnanalingam lifts us from the stratospheric frivolity of Kartik’s early ambitions and lands us smoothly onto the concrete tarmac of 2020 where we witness his disintegration through a series of events which are perhaps still painful for the collective Kiwi psyche to relive. The isolation. The breakdown of law and order. The fraying of bonds. The shattering of trust. And finally, the encounter with truth.

It is brave for the author to choose a main character who is emphatically not ‘model minority’ material, who is spurned by his own South Asian community, who is The Other’s Other, and to use him to hold up a mirror to Aotearoa New Zealand society. Perhaps there’s an archetypal function to this persona. Perhaps Gnanalingam knows that it is only by presenting the truth through this hyena, that we might be able to face our own most secret appetites.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Give Kartik Popat a column in the Herald

I did consider voting Green… and in hindsight, I probably should have, because it would have assisted my narrative going forward - “former disillusioned Green voter” sounded better, I must admit, than the sensible Khandallah Kaiser and pugilistic Perky-nana, and yes, I told Joe that I voted Green, and yes, I’ve since told people that I voted Green in 2005 because I’d gone too far with my lie.”

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Hook this review of Kartik Popat in the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books from @tzemingdynasty.bsky.social to my veins www.nzreviewofbooks.com/the-life-and...

Gnanalingam’s instantly iconic and deceptively clever thought-experiment The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, connects endstate far-right disinfo Disgrasians with our classic Asian diaspora starting point of ‘what if I was a loser with no friends?’

The novel is funny in a way that a car crash is funny, depending on who is locked inside it, whether they die or not, and who they might have tried to blow up. As both satire and great horror should be, it’s effective because it’s too real. The extreme levels of cringe cause you to leave your body at times, not least during the excruciating sex scenes. The internalised racism is matter-of-fact and constant. ‘Befriending my fellow Indians would seem like I’d failed,’ says Popat. With enough sunblock, he hopes ‘there was a chance that people would mistake me for a far more desirable Brazilian or Southern Italian’.

Like Gnanalingam’s last novel, Slow Down You’re Here (2022), this is an Asian horror story, with Popat the ghostly, ghastly threat of our own self-hatred, that other guy within who we know will only destroy us.
Perhaps it’s a flaw not to extend the grace of understanding to an unreliable narrator through complex characterisation in a contemporary novel – but there is understanding. We understand him really well. We are from there! Gnanalingam has already won literary recognition for more humanist empathetic novels, and now he has allowed us our sealed moment of recognition, disgust, horror, rejection and – if we are lucky, if we are in the mood – laughter.

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

I did throw in a joke about KP tank tops in the book in, er, an homage (?) to Patel’s tank top grift

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Lol thespinoff.co.nz/books/02-11-...

Ramaswamy is already being cut by Musk and having a tilt at the Ohio governorship

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

From Angelique Kasmara in Kete Books’ piece on reviewers’ favourite books of the year www.ketebooks.co.nz/en/reading-l...

Gnanalingam pulls us under the skin of a character that is at once loathsome, hilarious and wholly realised. It’s a book for this age: a timely, incendiary, and chilling glimpse into representational politics, echo chambers and how the algorithm machine has forever changed modern democracy

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I swear I was just taking the piss in Kartik Popat when I wrote that an MP character was given the ceremonial role of Minister for Railways to keep him occupied (despite there already being an SOE Minister and a Minister for Transport)

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has agreed to give Winston Peters a new role and will give him ministerial responsibility for rail

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Pretty amazing day, tbh, and proud as a tauiwi to march in support of Te Tiriti

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

This was the corner of Taranaki and Courtenay, near to when the front of the hikoi was reaching Parliament

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 26/10/2024

Launched!! Thank you everyone who came out for the launch of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat at 113 Taranaki St - super night! Never fear if you missed out, it’s available at good bookstores and here www.lawrenceandgibson.co.nz/product/pres...

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Brannavan Gnanalingam @brannavan.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

Front cover reveal! Hannah Salmon is a genius! Pre-sales are happening, with the book to be shipped out out late October www.lawrenceandgibson.co.nz/product/pres...