Abdul razak gurnah biography of william
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Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Zanzibari-born fiction writer who has been concerned with the linkage between identity, culture and place to the reality of complex processes of capitalist modernity that have been consistently overlooked in the past by previous African writers. Gurnah, unlike Wole Soyinka and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, has refused to ignore the formation of the new global world in today’s modernity since, in the contemporary post-colonial era, as a result of globalization, diversion, displacement, diasporic family perception and the quest for identity and belonging to a place have become the most concerning accounts rather than colonial experiences, nationality, language, or authenticity. Recent studies of Gurnah’s writing show that his style is dissimilar to that of Salman Rushdie or Hanefi Kureishi or other British writers. He does not perfectly fit the bill of a British fiction writer. Per
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‘Shaped but not defined’ bygd circumstances
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a critically acclaimed author, lecturer, Tanzanian flykting and recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gurnah hopes that this recognition leads to people discussing issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, both of which he personally experienced, and which remain huvud themes within his work.
Gurnah was “surprised and humbled” to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986, and only the fourth Black person to win the prize in its 120-year history.
Born in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, life became difficult for Gurnah following the instability surrounding Zanzibar’s independence from British colonial rule and the subsequent oppression and victimisation of citizens of Arab ursprung. After finishing school, when he was just 18 years old, Abdulrazak was forced to leave his family and homeland
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Abdulrazak Gurnah: ‘I write about what I know’
On December 7th, 2021, when Abdulrazak Gurnah accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature at the Swedish embassy in London, he was the first Black writer to win the prize since Toni Morrison received it in 1993. Gurnah was only the sixth African writer to receive the prize in the 120 years of its existence.
With Gurnah best known for novels such as Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005) and Afterlives (2020), the Nobel citation mentioned “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Now emeritus, Gurnah spent many years as professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, and so it is perhaps not surprising that he is thoughtful and deliberate in speech, using words with economy and care.
As a young man who fled to England in 1968 to escape the ravages of the Zanzibar Revolution (the Sultana