Brannavan Gnanalingam

His fourth novel, A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (2016), was long-listed for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards novel of the year. His fifth novel published in 2017, Sodden Downstream, was short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards novel of the year with The Spinoff books editor Steve Braunias noting that his inclusion was "a particularly good call." In a review of the book The Pantograph Punch said, "His rendition of Kiwi idiom is some of the best you’ll read." Gnanlingam confessed to The Dominion Post, talking about Sodden Downstream, "...[T]here are so few Sri Lankan characters in New Zealand literature. I wanted to reflect that....It's...based on the fact that the Sri Lankan Civil War was something that my family and I went through, so I can write from personal experience."

Gnanalingam was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Lower Hutt. His debut novel Getting Under Sail was published by Lawrence and Gibson in 2011. The novel was based on a trip Gnanalingam undertook with two friends from Morocco to Ghana, which included being mistakenly detained for the French tourist killings in Mauritania. The book was praised for "the narrator’s wry honesty, miles away from the usual Africa travelogue clichés". In 2013 his second novel You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here was published and received positive reviews in New Zealand. The book follows a trip by a middle-aged woman to Paris, who instead of finding it the city of love, experiences it as a cold and disorienting place. The book was based on Gnanalingam's time spent in Paris between 2012 and 2013 His third novel, Credit in the Straight World (2015), "a satirical account of the global financial crisis," was reviewed in Landfall, a New Zealand literary journal established in 1947, which The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English describes as: "the single most important journal in New Zealand literary history."

From 2006-2016, Gnanalingam contributed to the online publication The Lumière Reader, which is now on hiatus. He covered film festivals such as Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Cannes when writing for this publication. He has also written for The Spinoff, The New Zealand Listener, and The Dominion Post.

Brannavan Gnanalingam (born 1983, Sri Lanka) is a New Zealand author and practicing lawyer with the New Zealand firm Buddle Findlay at its Wellington office.