Dareechah-e-Nigaarish

Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948 - )

is a Tanzanian-British novelist who has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." 

In his novels, Gurnah has passionately exposed the effects Colonialism has on the oppressed, uprooted and migrating or internally displaced people of East Africa.  The characters in Gurnah's novels  find themselves in the gulf between cultures, the gulf between the life left behind in the old country and the life to come in a new country. As Gurnah's characters face systemic racism in the new/promised land they are compelled to suffer in silence and are forced into inventing a fictional past, a re-invented biography for themselves to salvage their scarred self-respect and basic human dignity. His characters have a simple, unadorned and disillusioned view of the world . . . His diction includes words from Swahili, Arabic, Hindi and German and his stories have references to both the Quran and the Arabian Nights.



Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. At the time of the Zanzibar Revolution he faced state sponsored terrorism unleashed on all Arab descent Africans living in Zanzibar. He arrived in England as a refugee in 1968 with Swahili as his native language. He learned to express himself in English. 

He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. Gurnah was Professor of Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Kent in the UK till his retirement recently.

Novels

• Memory of Departure (1987)^[25]
• Pilgrims Way (1988)^[26]
• Dottie (1990)^[27]
• Paradise (1994)^[28] (shortlisted for the Booker Prize^[29] and Whitbread Prize^[29])
• Admiring Silence (1996)^[30]
• By the Sea (2001)^[28] (longlisted for the Booker Prize;^[31] shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize^[31])
• Desertion (2005)^[32]
• The Last Gift (2011)^[33]
• Gravel Heart (2017)^[34]
• Afterlives (2020)^[35]

Short stories

• "Cages" (1984), in African short stories. Ed. by Chinua Achebe and Catherine Lynette Innes. Heinemann Education. ISBN 9780435902704
• "Bossy" (1994), in African rhapsody: Short stories of the contemporary African Experience. Ed. by Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385468169
• "Escort" (1996), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, no. 23, 44-48. doi:10.1080/02690059608589487
• "The Photograph of the Prince" (2012), in Road stories : new writing inspired by Exhibition Road. Ed. by Mary Morris. Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847
• "My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa" (2006)^[36]
• "The Arriver's Tale", Refugee Tales (2016)^[37]
• "The Stateless Person’s Tale", Refugee Tales III (2019)^[38]

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948^[6] in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which is now part of present day Tanzania.^[7] After fleeing Zanzibar at age 18 to escape persecution of Arab citizens during the Zanzibar Revolution, ^[8][9]  He arrived in England in 1968 as a refugee. Gurnah has been quoted saying, 'I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same - more people are struggling and running from terror states.'^{[10] [11]}

He initially studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded by the University of London.^[12] He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD, with a thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction,^[13] in 1982.^[7] From 1980 to 1983, Gurnah lectured at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He was a professor at the University of Kent's department of English until his retirement.^[8]

Gurnah edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing and has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoë Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has been a contributing editor of Wasafiri since 1987.^[14] He has been a judge for awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing^[15] and the Booker Prize.^[16]  Gurnah lives in the United Kingdom.^[17][18]

Gurnah was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.^[19]
Much of Gurnah's work is set on the coast of East Africa,^[20] and all but one of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar.^[21] Literary critic Bruce King argues that Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international context, observing that, in Gurnah's fiction, "Africans have always been part of the larger, changing world".^[22] According to King, Gurnah's characters are often uprooted, alienated, unwanted and therefore are, or feel, resentful victims".^[22] Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence, By the Sea, and Desertion all concern "the alienation and loneliness that emigration can produce and the soul-searching questions it gives rise to about fragmented identities and the very meaning of 'home'."^[23] She observes that Gurnah's characters typically do not succeed abroad following their migration, using irony and humour to respond to their situation.^[24]


Novels

• Memory of Departure (1987)^[25]
• Pilgrims Way (1988)^[26]
• Dottie (1990)^[27]
• Paradise (1994)^[28] (shortlisted for the Booker Prize^[29] and Whitbread Prize^[29])
• Admiring Silence (1996)^[30]
• By the Sea (2001)^[28] (longlisted for the Booker Prize;^[31] shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize^[31])
• Desertion (2005)^[32]
• The Last Gift (2011)^[33]
• Gravel Heart (2017)^[34]
• Afterlives (2020)^[35]

Short stories

• "Cages" (1984), in African short stories. Ed. by Chinua Achebe and Catherine Lynette Innes. Heinemann Education. ISBN 9780435902704
• "Bossy" (1994), in African rhapsody: Short stories of the contemporary African Experience. Ed. by Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385468169
• "Escort" (1996), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, no. 23, 44-48. doi:10.1080/02690059608589487
• "The Photograph of the Prince" (2012), in Road stories : new writing inspired by Exhibition Road. Ed. by Mary Morris. Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847
• "My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa" (2006)^[36]
• "The Arriver's Tale", Refugee Tales (2016)^[37]
• "The Stateless Person’s Tale", Refugee Tales III (2019)^[38]