The novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded 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". Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, in Tanzania, an extremely cosmopolitan territory long before globalisation.

After the peaceful liberation from British colonial rule in December 1963, Zanzibar went through a revolution that, under the regime of President Abeid Karume, led to the persecution of citizens of Arab origin. Gurnah was among them, and at just eighteen years old, having finished school, he was forced to leave his family and flee the country — the newly formed Republic of Tanzania — to emigrate to the United Kingdom.

The works of Abdulrazak Gurnah

The theme of migration has recurred in his works ever since he began writing at the age of 21, and although Swahili was his mother tongue, English became his literary language. His inspirations include Persian and Arabic poetry, but above all English literature, from Shakespeare to Naipaul.

The African writer has published ten novels and numerous short stories, in which he has deliberately broken with convention, overturning the colonial perspective to embrace the viewpoint of indigenous peoples, while at the same time striving to avoid the ever-present nostalgia for an unspoilt Africa.

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The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

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His debut novel, Memory of Departure, published in 1987, tells of a failed uprising on the African continent: the young protagonist attempts to escape the social ruin of the coast, hoping to be taken under the wing of a wealthy uncle in Nairobi, but is humiliated and returned to his broken family, with a violent, alcoholic father and a sister forced into prostitution. The novel Desertion, published in 2005, stands in stark contrast to the traditional story of the European hero boasting of his conquests. As does his latest work, Afterlives, published in 2020, which tells of an emigrant's return to his homeland and the need to keep alive the memory of those who are no longer there to greet him.

Before maps, the world had no boundaries. Maps gave it a shape and made it resemble a territory, something that can be owned, as well as ravaged and plundered.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the sea

The Africa we do not know

Gurnah's itinerant characters find themselves in a state of uncertainty, suspended between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life that is. "His dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking. This can make him dark and uncompromising as he follows the destinies of individuals with great compassion and unwavering commitment. His novels retract from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze onto a culturally diverse East Africa, unknown to many in other parts of the world," the Nobel Prize jury explained.

Gurnah, who taught postcolonial literature at the University of Kent until his retirement, was only able to return to Zanzibar in 1984, in time to say a final farewell to his dying father — whose memory will live on in the words his son has set down indelibly on the page.