Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-British novelist and academic born on 20 December 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar. He fled to the United Kingdom in 1968 as a refugee following the Zanzibar Revolution, later gaining British citizenship. He studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, earned a PhD from the University of Kent in 1982, and taught English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent until his retirement in 2017, becoming professor emeritus. Gurnah's literary career began in his twenties with his debut novel Memory of Departure (1987). His works explore themes of colonialism, exile, displacement, and refugee experiences, often set on East Africa's coast. Notable novels include Paradise (1994, shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), and Afterlives (2020). In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 'uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,' becoming the first Black writer since Toni Morrison (1993) to win the award.