Abdulrazak Gurnah

Also known as Gurnah, Abdulrazak S. Gurnah, Abdul Razzaq Gurnah, Abd al-Razzaq Journa

Tanzanian-born British writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2021) (born 1948)

AI overview

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 for his powerful storytelling about the effects of colonialism and displacement on individuals and communities. His work is significant because it gives voice to experiences often overlooked in world literature, particularly those shaped by East African history and the trauma of forced migration.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 20 December 1948
Works: 43

Top works

À Beira-mar
By the Sea
Essays on African Writing 2
Theft
Paradise

via Open Library + Wikidata

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 6
Total plays: 51

via Last.fm · Abdulrazak Gurnah

Quotes

“"The curious thing, of course, is the person presiding over this is herself somebody who would have come here, or her parents would have come here, to confront those attitudes themselves." What would he say to her if she were here now? “I would say, ‘Maybe a little more compassion might not be a bad thing.’ But I don’t want to get into a dialogue with Priti Patel, really.””
““It seems to me that fiction is the bridge between these things, the bridge between this immense scholarship and that kind of popular perception. So you can read about these matters as fiction. And I hope that the reaction then is to say, ‘I didn’t know that’ and possibly for the reader, ‘I must go and read something about that.’””

Article

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian novelist and academic of Yemeni origin. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

In 2021, Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". On 1 September 2024, Gurnah took up the appointment of the Arts Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is also Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.