Nobel prize winner
Tanzanian novelist wins Nobel Prize in literature Congratulations to Abdulrazak Gurnah, who in October became the first Tanzanian to win the prestigious literary award. The writer left Zanzibar when he was 18 and exile and escape have been recurring themes in his work. Jahazi takes a closer look at the career of the now US$ 1,150,000 richer author.
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n October 11, when Zanzibar-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah first got the call informing him he had won the Nobel prize in literature, he assumed someone was playing a joke. It was only after he put the phone down and it immediately rang again, heralding a succession of calls from the world’s media desperate for an interview that it began to sink in. The Nobel prize in literature is the world’s most famous literary award with a roll-call of laureates that goes back to 1901 and which includes luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan. Gurnah’s place on that list is a landmark with the writer not only becoming the first Tanzanian to win but also the first black African recipient since Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka in 1986.
of English at Kent University. Still his East African roots and the indelible sense of dislocation that stemmed from being wrenched from his homeland never left him and became predominant themes in his fiction. While memories of his early years in Zanzibar remained strong, he looked even further back as a writer, detailing the African experience – in the intimate spaces created by families, companions and friendships – during the warring British and German colonial control in the late 19th century.
While Gurnah may have met the news with incredulity, there are many in the literary world who have long thought the 73-year-old author was overdue such global recognition. Since starting writing seriously in his early 20s, he has published 10 highly acclaimed novels and a number of short stories. His fourth novel, ‘Paradise’, was shortlisted for
his most recent release, ‘Afterlives’, was among the six nominated novels for this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction – another UK award. Gurnah left Zanzibar in 1966 when he was 18 years old. The aftermath of the revolution in 1964, when the Sultan of Zanzibar and his main Arab government were overthrown, was still being keenly felt by the islands’ Muslims and the young Gurnah was forced to leave his family behind and flee to the UK as a refugee. The country has become his adopted home. He now lives in Canterbury, in the south-east of England, where he continues to write and was until his recent
the UK’s Booker Prize in 1994, while
retirement the emeritus professor
Leaving Zanzibar
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Abdulrazak Gurnah © Mark Pringle
African lives Novelist Maaza Mengiste, writing for UK newspaper The Guardian, says these sensitive portrayals of ordinary African lives in extraordinary circumstances create a fresh understanding of history. “Each of Gurnah’s novels focus on the stories of those whose stories might not have made it into the archives or who lack the documents that would make them memorable to the larger world. But these shopkeepers, homemakers, askaris, students and refugees all matter to him and in the course of his writing, he makes them meaningful and complicated, and reminds us that every single one is worthy of remembrance.”
