Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 1948, Zanzibar (now in Tanzania)) is a Tanzanian-born British author known for his novels about the effects of colonialism, the refugee experience, and displacement in the world. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021.

Gurnah was born to a Muslim family of Yemeni descent in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, an island that was then a British protectorate but is now part of Tanzania. When Gurnah was a teenager, a coup in 1964 overthrew the Arab rulers on Zanzibar and led to political upheaval and the persecution of Arab citizens in the following years. He left the island in the late 1960s and went to Canterbury, England, where he attended Christ Church College (now Canterbury Christ Church University). Gurnah received a B.Ed. in 1976 and then taught secondary school in Dover, Kent, England. He went on to attend the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1982; his thesis was on the topic of “Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction.” While working toward a doctorate, Gurnah taught at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria from 1980 to 1982. He joined the University of Kent’s department of English in 1985, and there he lectured until his retirement as emeritus professor of English and postcolonial literatures in 2017.

Although Gurnah’s first language was Swahili, he wrote in English. He drew from a wide array of literary traditions, such as the surahs of the Qurʾān, Arabic and Persian poetry, and Shakespeare. Central to much of his writing were the themes of the long-reaching and destructive impact of colonialism and the upheaval experienced by immigrants and refugees. When Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, the prize committee cited “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

By Gurnah’s own recollection, he began writing when he was about 21 years of age. His first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), was initially completed about 1973, but he was unable to find a publisher for it for 12 years and revised it continually during that time. The story, set in coastal East Africa, is told from the perspective of 15-year-old Hassan, who aspires to escape the violence and poverty of his small village by going to live with a relative in Kenya but does not find what he had hoped for. Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise (1994), is considered to be his breakthrough work. Set in East Africa in the early 20th century, it is a coming-of-age story about 12-year-old Yusuf, who has been sold to a trader by his father as repayment for a debt; his experiences include journeying into the interior of the continent and observing how the traditional way of life is being transformed by the encroachment of colonialism. Gurnah’s sixth novel, By the Sea (2001), is the tale of an aging Muslim refugee who uses an assumed identity to gain asylum and settle in England, where he eventually encounters the son of the man whose identity he has taken. In Desertion (2005) Gurnah illustrated the impact colonialism had on love and various relationships, opening with the story of Martin, an English scholar visiting in East Africa and his affair with Rehana; the tale begins in the late 19th century and continues through multiple generations. In Afterlives (2020) Gurnah examines the brutality of the German colonial presence in East Africa in the early 20th century and the impact that it has on the lives of Tanganyikans, particularly the characters Ilyas, Hamza, and Afiya.

Gurnah’s other works included Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Admiring Silence (1996), The Last Gift (2011), and Gravel Heart (2017). He was the editor of Essays on African Writing 1: A Re-evaluation (1993), Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature (1995), and The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007). Long involved with the literary magazine Wasafiri, which had its inaugural issue in 1984, Gurnah served in various positions including editor, contributor, and advisory board member. In 2006 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.