Nobel Prize for Literature
- Abdulrazak Gurnah, 72, who was born in Zanzibar and now lives in the UK, became the fifth African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (1986), Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (1988), and South African writers Nadine Gordimer (1991) and John M Coetzee (2003).
Gurnah’s work
- The author of 10 novels and several short stories and essays, including Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), Gravel Heart (2017) and, most recently, Afterlives (2020), Gurnah’s writing explores the immigrant experience and how exile and loss shape identities and cultures.
- Most of his books feature African Arab protagonists trying to come to terms with dislocation and estrangement, looking in on societies and cultures on which their holds are tenuous.
- For instance, Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, references British modernist writer Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), as its protagonist Yusuf comes of age at a time of violent colonial expansion in East Africa in the late 19th century.In most of his works, Gurnah eschews nostalgia and upends genre tropes to show the tension and insecurity latent in the constantly shifting sands of displacement.
- In By the Sea, another novel nominated for the Booker Prize, he explores the refugee’s struggle to both remember and to forget."