Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Nobel Prize–winning author and Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literature. He was born in 1948 in Zanzibar [present-day Tanzania]. At the age of eighteen, he fled to the United Kingdom during the Zanzibar Revolution. There, he first studied at Christ Church College in Canterbury and later at the University of Kent, where he earned a PhD in 1982 with a dissertation on West African literature. From 1980 to 1983, he taught at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria, before becoming a Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent.

Gurnah began writing after moving to the United Kingdom. Out of homesickness, he initially recorded his thoughts in a diary; over time, these reflections evolved into fictional stories, eventually leading to his first novel, »Memory of Departure« (1987). Already in this debut, he introduced the central theme of all his subsequent works—the examination of the traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement. While English became the language of his literature, he also integrated Swahili, Arabic, and German into his texts. His stories are often set along the East African coast, and his protagonists are frequently uprooted and lonely.

The plot of »Paradise« is set in East Africa at the end of the 19th century. In this coming-of-age story, twelve-year-old Yusuf—named after the prophet Yusuf in the Quran—is sent to live with an »uncle« in the city after his father falls into debt. Amid a finely layered mix of African Muslims, Christian missionaries, and Indian moneylenders, Yusuf tries to find his way. After returning from a perilous caravan journey, he is confronted with a new reality—the onset of German colonial rule.
Gurnah’s novel »By the Sea« is a story of love and betrayal, of loss of homeland and estrangement. Two men from Zanzibar, who have sought asylum in the UK and whose families back home were entangled in a decades-long, draining dispute over a house, exchange memories of their youth and flight, and strive for reconciliation.
»Afterlives« tells the story of three young people struggling to maintain their integrity in the shadow of the colonial world order. Abdulrazak Gurnah offers a nuanced depiction of the role played by German settlers and soldiers in the colonization of East Africa.
Gurnah’s most recent novel, »Theft«, follows the lives of three young people growing up in postcolonial East Africa.

In 2006, Gurnah was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was nominated several times for the Booker Prize and was 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.« The author lives in Canterbury.

Status: 2025

Memory of Departure

Jonathan Cape
London, 1987

Pilgrims Way

Jonathan Cape
London, 1988

Dottie

Jonathan Cape
London, 1990

Paradise

Hamish Hamilton
London, 1994

By the Sea

The New Press
New York, 2001

Desertion

Bloomsbury
London, 2005

Afterlives

Bloomsbury
London, 2020

Theft

Bloomsbury
London, 2025