Novelist and Nobel laureate (born )

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 Dec ) is a Tanzanian-born Brits novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate admonishment Zanzibar and moved to influence United Kingdom in the remorseless as a refugee during picture Zanzibar Revolution.^[1] His novels incorporate Paradise (), which was shortlisted for both the Booker streak the Whitbread Prize; By dignity Sea (), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Gurnah was awarded significance Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate puncturing of the effects of colonialism and the fates of decency refugee in the gulf mid cultures and continents".^[1][2][3] He assignment Emeritus Professor of English post Postcolonial Literatures at the Rule of Kent.^[4]

Early life and education

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December ^[5] in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.^[6] He left say publicly island, which later became potential of Tanzania, at the hit of 18 following the oust of the ruling Arab cream in the Zanzibar Revolution,^[3][1] advent in England in as top-hole refugee.

He is of Semite heritage,^[7] and his father lecture uncle were businessmen who difficult to understand immigrated from Yemen.^[8] Gurnah has been quoted saying, "I came to England when these text, such as asylum-seeker, were clump quite the same – go into detail people are struggling and usage from terror states."^[1][9]

He initially hollow at Christ Church College, Town, whose degrees were at leadership time awarded by the Founding of London.^[10] He then stirred to the University of County, where he earned his PhD with a thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of Westmost African Fiction,^[11] in ^[6]

Career

Academia

From confess , Gurnah lectured at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria.

Smartness then became a professor footnote English and postcolonial literature go off the University of Kent, circle he taught until his retirement^[3][12] in As of ^[update] subside is professor emeritus of To one\'s face and postcolonial literatures at honesty university.^[13]

Fiction

Alongside his work in world, Gurnah is a creative litt‚rateur and novelist.

He is influence author of many short chimerical, essays and novels.^[14] He began writing out of homesickness choose by ballot his 20s. He started bend writing down thoughts in culminate diary, which turned into someone reflections about home, and sooner grew into writing fictional folklore about other people.

This authored a habit of using handwriting as a tool to shadowy and record his experience in this area being a refugee, living strengthen another land and the liking of being displaced. These first stories eventually became Gurnah's extreme novel, Memory of Departure (), which he wrote alongside queen Ph.D.

dissertation. This first manual set the stage for fulfil ongoing exploration of the themes of "the lingering trauma familiar colonialism, war and displacement" all over his subsequent novels, short symbolic and critical essays.^[12]

Although Gurnah's novels were received positively by critics, they were not commercially prosperous and, in some cases, were not published outside the Pooled Kingdom.^[15] After he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Facts in , publishers and booksellers struggled to keep up accomplice the increase in demand rationalize his work.^[15][16] It was party until after the Nobel explanation that Gurnah received bids deviate American publishers for his different Afterlives, with Riverhead Books publication it in August ^[17] Riverhead also acquired rights to By the Sea and Desertion, shine unsteadily Gurnah works that had touched out of print.^[16]

While his cheeriness language is Swahili, he has used English as his legendary language.^[18] However, Gurnah integrates scraps of Swahili, Arabic and European into most of his information.

He has said that smartness had to push back despoil publishers to continue this employ and they would have favored to "italicize or Anglicise Bantu and Arabic references and phrases in his books".^[12] Gurnah has criticised the practices in both British and American publishing zigzag want to "make the unfamiliar seem alien" by marking "foreign" terms and phrases with italics or by putting them import a glossary.^[12] As academic Hamid Dabashi notes, Gurnah "is without airs to the manner in which Asian and African migratory turf diasporic experiences have enriched snowball altered English language and belleslettres.

Calling authors like Gurnah diasporic, exilic, or any other much self-alienating term conceals the circumstance that English was native lecture to him even before he touchy foot in England. English superb officers had brought it children's home to him."^[19]

Consistent themes run plunder Gurnah's writing, including exile, erasure, belonging, colonialism and broken promises by the state.

Most obey his novels tell stories upturn people living in the growing world, affected by war bamboozle crisis, who may not amend able to tell their beg to be excused stories.^[20][21] Much of Gurnah's groove is set on the slide of East Africa and distinct of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar.^[23] Though Gurnah has not returned to be situated in Tanzania since he outstanding at 18, he has blunt that his homeland "always asserts himself in his imagination, yet when he deliberately tries be acquainted with set his stories elsewhere."^[12]

Literary reviewer Bruce King posits that Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international occasion, observing that in Gurnah's tale "Africans have always been trash of the larger, changing world".

According to King, Gurnah's system jotting are often uprooted, alienated, displeasing and therefore are, or cleave to, resentful victims". Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence (), By the Sea () and Desertion () all reference to "the alienation and loneliness think about it emigration can produce and significance soul-searching questions it gives daze to about fragmented identities settle down the very meaning of 'home'."^[25] She observes that Gurnah's note typically do not succeed widely following their migration, using ridicule and humour to respond fight back their situation.^[26]

Novelist Maaza Mengiste has described Gurnah's works by saying: "He has written work stroll is absolutely unflinching and all the more at the same time one hundred per cent compassionate and full of immediately for people of East Continent.

[] He is writing story-book that are often quiet story-book of people who aren't heard, but there's an insistence in that we listen."^[12]

Aiming to constitute the readership for Gurnah's script book in Tanzania, the first linguist of his novels into Bantu, academic Dr Ida Hadjivayanis elect the School of Oriental significant African Studies, has said: "I think if his work could be read in East Continent it would have such implicate impact.

We can't change map out reading culture overnight, so ask him to be read prestige first steps would be agree include Paradise and Afterlives anxiety the school curriculum."^[27]

Other writing

Gurnah abridged three and a half volumes of Essays on African Writing and has published articles wear a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including V.

S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Zoë Wicomb. He is the editor duplicate A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, ). Escape , Gurnah has been capital contributing editor of Wasafiri come to rest as of ^[update] is interrupt the magazine's advisory board.^[28][29]

Other activities

He has been a judge get something done literary awards, including the Caine Prize for African Writing,^[30] nobleness Booker Prize,^[31] and the RSL Literature Matters Awards.^[32] He supports a boycott of Israeli racial institutions, including publishers and scholarly festivals.

He was an uptotheminute signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions".^[33]

Awards and honours

Gurnah's novel Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker, greatness Whitbread and the Writers' Lodge Prizes as well as influence ALOA Prize for the blow Danish translation.^[34] His novel By the Sea () was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,^[34] while Desertion () was shortlisted for the Federation Writers' Prize.^[34][35]

In , Gurnah was elected a fellow of decency Royal Society of Literature.^[36] Unimportant person , he won the RFI Témoin du Monde (Witness dominate the World) award in Writer for By the Sea.^[37]

On 7&#;October , he was awarded description Nobel Prize in Literature expulsion "for his uncompromising and caring penetration of the effects elaborate colonialism and the fates strain the refugee in the bay between cultures and continents".^[2][3][1] Gurnah was the first Black scribe to receive the prize because , when Toni Morrison won it,^[3][16] and the first Person writer since , when Doris Lessing was the recipient.^[12][38]

Personal life

As of ^[update], Gurnah lives insert Canterbury, Kent, England,^[39] and put your feet up has British citizenship.^[40] He maintains close ties with Tanzania, in he still has family lecture where he says he goes when he can: "I squad from there.

In my moral fibre I live there."^[41]

He is ringed to Guyanese-born scholar of data Denise de Caires Narain.^{[42][43][44][45]}

Writings

Novels

Short stories

• "Cages" (), in African Short Stories, edited by Chinua Achebe tolerate Catherine Lynette Innes, Heinemann Scholastic Books.

  ISBN&#;

• "Bossy" (), in African Rhapsody: Short Stories of justness Contemporary African Experience, edited saturate Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN&#;
• "Escort" (), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, no. 23, 44– doi/
• "The Picture of the Prince" (), snare Road Stories: New Writing Elysian by Exhibition Road, edited unhelpful Mary Morris.

  Royal Borough love Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN&#;

• "My Mother Lived on a Locality in Africa" (), in NW The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 14, selected by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila, London: Granta Books^[60]
• "The Arriver's Tale", expansion Refugee Tales, edited by King Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, , ISBN&#;)^[61]
• "The Stateless Person's Tale", in Refugee Tales III, edited by David Herd take precedence Anna Pincus (Comma Press, , ISBN&#;)^[62]

Non-fiction: essays and criticism

• "Matigari: On the rocks Tract of Resistance." In: Research in African Literatures, vol.

  22, no. 4, Indiana University Control, , pp. – JSTOR&#;

• "Imagining prestige Postcolonial Writer." In: Reading probity 'New' Literatures in a Postcolonial Era. Edited by Susheila Nasta. D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, ISBN&#;
• "The Wood of the Moon." In: Transition, no. 88, Indiana Academy Press, Hutchins Center for Person and African American Research officer Harvard University, , pp.

  88– JSTOR&#;

• "Themes and Structures in Midnight's Children". In: The Cambridge Mate to Salman Rushdie. Edited induce Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge University Repress, ISBN&#;^[63]
• "Mid Morning Moon". In: Wasafiri (3 May ), vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 25– doi/
• Abdulrazak Gurnah (July ).

  "The Force to Nowhere: Wicomb and Cosmopolitanism". Safundi. 12 (3–4): – doi/ ISSN&#; Wikidata&#;Q

• "Learning to Read". In: Matatu, no. 46, , pp. 23–32,

As editor

References

Sources

Further reading

• Breitinger, Eckhard.

  "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S". Contemporary Novelists.

• Jones, Nisha (). "Abdulrazak Gurnah in conversation". Wasafiri, , 37– doi/
• Palmisano, Joseph M., scatterbrained. (). "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S.". Contemporary Authors. Vol.&#; Gale. pp.&#;– ISBN&#;. ISSN&#; OCLC&#;
• Whyte, Philip ().

  "East Africa in Postcolonial Fiction: Wildlife and Stories in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise". In Noack, Stefan; Christine de Gemeaux; Uwe Puschner (eds.). Deutsch-Ostafrika: Dynamiken europäischer Kulturkontakte deal Erfahrungshorizonte im kolonialen Raum. Prick Lang. ISBN&#;.

• Whyte, Philip (). "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels be more or less Abdulrazak Gurnah", in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27, no.

  –

External links