From my Substack:
When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, he was comparatively little-known. I must confess that I had never heard of him. This is despite the fact that I am an ardent fan of English literature and am also deeply interested in issues of colonialism. I have read most of the fiction concerned with British colonialism in South Asia including Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Scott’s The Raj Quartet and Forster’s A Passage to India. Perhaps part of the reason that I was not familiar with Gurnah’s work was that I have not focused much on Africa as a region (except for North Africa, which can be said to be more of an extension of the Arab world than the African continent proper). However, even within the domain of African fiction, Gurnah is an author that is unfamiliar to most readers. For example, school curricula in the US often include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. I very much doubt that any curricula so far has included Gurnah’s works. Hopefully, that will change now that he has received the Nobel Prize.
Gurnah is a British citizen of Zanzibari origin. He grew up at a time when Zanzibar was a British protectorate separate from the colony of Tanganyika. After both colonies achieved independence, a revolution overthrew the Arab elite in Zanzibar and the region later merged with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. Gurnah had left to study in the UK before this revolution broke out and he describes himself as a refugee. He completed his Phd in Literature and served as a Professor at the University of Kent, from which he recently retired. His academic work deals with postcolonial literature, including that of Rushdie. Continue reading Review: Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah