Memory of Departure (1987)
His first novel: a young man tries to escape a ruined coastal town and a violent father
Literature · Novelists
Abdulrazak Gurnah
born 1948 · Tanzanian-British
Postcolonial fiction of the Indian Ocean
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 for novels about displacement along the Swahili coast and in England. Born in Zanzibar, he fled as a teenager after the 1964 revolution and spent his career teaching at the University of Kent, writing in English about German East Africa, the Indian Ocean trade world and the reception refugees meet in Britain. His fourth novel, set on a caravan route into the interior before the First World War, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
How to spot them
- ▸Nobel laureate 2021; born in Zanzibar, resident in England since 1968
- ▸German East Africa, the Schutztruppe and the askari; the Indian Ocean monsoon trade
- ▸Professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury
- ▸Refugees arriving in a cold, unwelcoming England; withheld family histories
- ▸His first language is Swahili, but he writes in English
Key works
Paradise (1994)
Yusuf is handed over as a debt bond to the merchant Aziz and taken on a trading caravan into the interior before 1914; shortlisted for the Booker Prize
By the Sea (2001)
An elderly Zanzibari claims asylum at Gatwick carrying only a box of incense, and meets the man whose family his own had ruined
Desertion (2005)
An Englishman staggers out of the desert into a Kenyan coastal town in 1899, and the consequences run down three generations
Afterlives (2020)
German East Africa and the askari who fought for the Schutztruppe, and what became of them after the war
Gravel Heart (2017)
Salim leaves Zanzibar for London and slowly learns why his father withdrew from the family
Theft (2025)
His first novel since the Nobel Prize: three young Tanzanians in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam at the end of the twentieth century
Key ideas
- The Indian Ocean as a world of its own, with older histories of trade and slavery than European empire
- Displacement and the stories migrants edit, withhold or reinvent to survive
- The German colonial presence in East Africa, a subject largely absent from anglophone fiction
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 20 December 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania
- •He left for England in 1968 as a refugee after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and the persecution of Arab-descended citizens
- •He wrote his doctorate at the University of Kent and taught there until retirement, latterly as Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures
- •Swahili is his first language; he began writing in English in his twenties
- •Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, the year James Kelman won with How Late It Was, How Late
- •By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001
- •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents"
- •He edited critical volumes on African writing and on Salman Rushdie
- •He learned of the Nobel award by telephone while in his kitchen, and at first assumed it was a prank
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Sources
- The Nobel Prize — Abdulrazak Gurnah: Facts
- The Booker Prizes — Abdulrazak Gurnah