Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel

• Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Thenobel Committee said he has been awarded the Prize “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

• Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar in Tanzanian territory off the coast of East Africa in the Indian Ocean. He reached England as a refugee in the end of 1960s. Gurnah has until his recent retirement been Professor of English and Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

• Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. 

• He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and even though Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool.

• Gurnah’s writing is from his time in exile but pertains to his relationship with the place he had left, which means that memory is of vital importance for the genesis of his work. 

• His debut novel, ‘Memory of Departure’, from 1987, is about a failed uprising and keeps us on the African continent.

• Gurnah’s fourth novel, ‘Paradise’ (1994), his breakthrough as a writer, evolved from a research trip to East Africa around 1990. The novel was nominated for the Booker Prize.

• Gurnah’s latest novel, ‘Afterlives’ (2020), takes up where Paradise ends.

• His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world, the Nobel Committee said. 

• In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense. 

• An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.

Major works of Gurnah: 

• Memory of Departure - 1987

• Pilgrims Way - 1988

• Dottie - 1990

• Paradise - 1994

• Admiring Silence - 1996

• By the Sea - 2001

• Desertion - 2005

• The Last Gift - 2011

• Gravel Heart - 2017

• Afterlives - 2020.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store