Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, then a sultanate, into a family whose roots lay partly in Yemen. After the revolution of 1964 overthrew the island’s ruling elite, he left at eighteen and arrived in England in 1968 as a refugee. His first language is Swahili, but English became the language of his writing. He studied at Christ Church College in Canterbury and took a doctorate at the University of Kent on the criticism of West African fiction, having taught for three years at Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria; he then taught at Kent until his retirement in 2017.

His fiction began in the notes he kept on homesickness and displacement, which became his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987). Paradise (1994), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a boy given over to a merchant in East Africa on the eve of the First World War, and unsettles the familiar colonial narrative by placing Arab, Indian, African and European worlds in uneasy contact. By the Sea and Desertion turn to the refugee’s divided life and to a love affair that crosses colonial lines, while Afterlives (2020) returns to German East Africa and the long reach of its violence. His novels are patient and humane, with Swahili, Arabic and German woven into their English, and suspicious of every tidy version of the past.

The Nobel Prize in 2021 honoured his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee. Several of his books had fallen out of print in the United States, and the prize brought new editions and a far wider readership. He is professor emeritus at Kent, and in 2024 joined New York University Abu Dhabi.