Debut London Literature: James Cahill & Gurnaik Johal on publishing their first books

And on the opening night of this year’s festival we host the perfect opportunity to do the latter, with an event celebrating debut titles from a quartet of the newest writers to emerge from the capital city. Between them, through poetry and prose, these writers shine a light on all that London is and can be, from bus routes to bustling art scene, new found freedoms to colonial legacy.

Ahead of the event we caught up with two of the authors to feature in the event, the short story writer Gurnaik Johal and author James Cahill, to talk about their inspirations, the process and feelings of writing and releasing their debut work, and how literature’s gain is art, and the Wild West’s, loss.

Gurnaik Johal

Hailing from west London, Gurnaik Johal was shortlisted for The Guardian/Fourth Estate BAME short story prize in 2018, and earlier this year his short story Arrival won the Galley Beggar Press Prize. Arrival is the first story from Johal’s debut collection We Move, which explores multiple generations of immigrants as it maps an area of west London.

So, what gave you the inspiration for the stories of We Move?

I struggle to think of specific inspirations for it – I’m inspired to an extent by almost everything in all sorts of mediums. That’s one way of justifying all the time I spend on YouTube and Twitter; everything is research, everything is work.

How does it feel to be sending something you’ve put so much time and creative endeavour into, out into the wider world?

It’s strange relinquishing control over something that I’ve been obsessively working on for four to five years. It feels nice that it’s very much the readers’ book now, as well as mine.

And with We Move being your first collection, when writing it did you have an audience in mind, or were you writing more for yourself?

I didn’t have any audience in mind, no, but I also wasn’t writing for myself. I suppose I’m writing for some anonymous reader who I know nothing about.

I believe in the writing cliché that the universal is held within the specific. And while my book is about a specific time and place, I’d hope it would be entertaining to readers from all over. I enjoy books from different centuries, from different parts of the world, by people entirely different to me. So I hope We Move will go on to get a wide and varied readership.

‘I believe in the writing cliché that the universal is held within the specific. While We Move is about a specific time and place, I’d hope it would be entertaining to readers from all over.’

Has there been a review of We Move that has surprised you at all?

Well, one Amazon review said the book had ‘too many words.’ That was certainly surprising!

Who are your own literary, and non-literary influences?

Reading Zadie Smith as a teenager was influential. Although most of my influences are probably non-literary; the films of Kelly Reichardt, the music of MF DOOM, and at the moment lots of reality television shows like 90 Day Fiancé.

Did you always want to be a writer? And if you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be instead?

As a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. Later on an architect, or a graphic designer, or a musician or an artist. I didn’t have the skills for any of those things (I’ve never ridden a horse), so I have ended up using my limited skill set two ways; working a day job as an editor and writing outside of that. If I had to choose a different creative pursuit now, it would probably be cooking. 

James Cahill

For the last decade London-born James Cahill has combined a career in the art world and academia with writing. His work has been published in The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Review of Books and The Burlington Magazine, among other publications. His 1990s-set debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, which sees a repressed art historian expand his horizons, was published earlier this year.

What gave you the inspiration for Tiepolo Blue?

It began with the character of Don. I imagined a man who is renowned in his academic field, but fatally inexperienced in matters of love or desire. An image formed in my mind of an art historian in his early forties, an expert on the Italian artist Tiepolo (I’ve always loved Tiepolo’s paintings of skies filled with soaring bodies). I wondered what it would be like for such a man to break out of his old world and to embrace his long-suppressed sexuality. My own experiences shaped the novel – growing up in south London, encountering the gay scene as a teenager, and then working in the London art world for more than a decade. I was thinking a lot about the art of the 1990s around the time I began Tiepolo Blue, and the buzzing social scene that propelled it. My academic research into that era in British art was an important catalyst for the novel.

How does it feel to be sending something you’ve put so much time and creative endeavour into, out into the wider world?

It’s been amazing to see the novel take on a life of its own in the minds of readers. The process of writing and publication felt like a gradual separation of the novel from me – a ‘setting free’ of the story. It began as something entirely in my imagination, then slowly took written form, and now it feels like its own entity. It belongs to readers as much as to me.

With Tiepolo Blue being your first book, when writing it did you have an audience in mind, or were you writing more for yourself?

For a long time, I never really thought about who would read the novel or what might happen to it. I was writing it for its own sake. It was driven by the desire to bring Don to life. While I want the story to resonate with readers, I still think it’s important not to be overly conscious of who might end up reading it or how they will perceive it.

‘It’s been amazing to see the novel take on a life of its own in the minds of readers. The process of writing and publication felt like a gradual separation of the novel from me – a ‘setting free’ of the story.’

Has there been a review of Tiepolo Blue that has surprised you at all?

I try not to have preconceptions about how people will react, and so I wouldn’t say I’ve been surprised by any one review. Novels, if they have layers of meaning, should prompt different interpretations, perhaps even contradictory ones. While a few interpretations of the book have struck me as blinkered, several have thrown light on aspects I’d forgotten about or not consciously examined. I was pleased that several reviewers picked up on the progressive shift in Tiepolo Blue from a traditional narrative formula to something darker and weirder.

Who are your own literary, and non-literary influences?

Writers who were in my mind as I wrote Tiepolo Blue include James Baldwin, Anthony Burgess, Roberto Calasso, André Gide, Siri Hustvedt, Javier Marías, Iris Murdoch, and Donna Tartt – and also the Roman poet Ovid. In the novel, I wanted to evoke the kind of unstable mood and fluctuating pace that you find in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Art was also a huge inspiration – the frescoes of Giambattista Tiepolo, the paintings of Caravaggio, the provocative new art of the 1990s, and much else.

Did you always want to be a writer? And if you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be instead?

I think the desire to write fiction was always there from a young age. I wrote a novel – or a large fragment of one – at the age of 14. But I wanted to do other things too, and so I’ve pursued various overlapping paths – working in the art world in London, writing about art, conducting academic research on 1990s British art and its relationships with classical antiquity. In Tiepolo Blue, I’ve drawn on all of these experiences. Writing spans everything I’ve done, so it’s hard to imagine a life without that. I’d like to have been a painter, though.