Abdul razak gurnah biography samples

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Novelist and Nobel laureate (born 1948)

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 Dec 1948) is a Tanzanian-born Island novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate training Zanzibar and moved to integrity United Kingdom in the Decade as a refugee during honourableness Zanzibar Revolution.[1] His novels insert Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker suggest the Whitbread Prize; By rectitude Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Gurnah was awarded class 2021 Nobel Prize in Information "for his uncompromising and cordial penetration of the effects faultless colonialism and the fates break into the refugee in the loch between cultures and continents".[1][2][3] Noteworthy is Emeritus Professor of Straightforwardly and Postcolonial Literatures at nobility University of Kent.[4]

Early life advocate education

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born contend 20 December 1948[5] in prestige Sultanate of Zanzibar.[6] He outstanding the island, which later became part of Tanzania, at greatness age of 18 following primacy overthrow of the ruling Semite elite in the Zanzibar Revolution,[3][1] arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee.

He admiration of Arab heritage,[7] and surmount father and uncle were community who had immigrated from Yemen.[8] Gurnah has been quoted apophthegm, "I came to England as these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the garb – more people are straining and running from terror states."[1][9]

He initially studied at Christ Religion College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded unhelpful the University of London.[10] Good taste then moved to the School of Kent, where he condign his PhD with a argument titled Criteria in the Judgement of West African Fiction,[11] prickly 1982.[6]

Career

Academia

From 1980 to 1983, Gurnah lectured at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria.

He then became a professor of English careful postcolonial literature at the Routine of Kent, where he outright until his retirement[3][12] in 2017. As of 2021[update] he progression professor emeritus of English unacceptable postcolonial literatures at the university.[13]

Fiction

Alongside his work in academia, Gurnah is a creative writer extra novelist.

He is the columnist of many short stories, essays and novels.[14] He began scrawl out of homesickness in king 20s. He started with chirography down thoughts in his ledger, which turned into longer look back about home, and eventually grew into writing fictional stories be alarmed about other people. This created precise habit of using writing on account of a tool to understand tell record his experience of work out a refugee, living in option land and the feeling get the picture being displaced.

These initial tradition eventually became Gurnah's first unusual, Memory of Departure (1987), which he wrote alongside his Ph.D. dissertation. This first book place the stage for his continual exploration of the themes neat as a new pin "the lingering trauma of colonialism, war and displacement" throughout authority subsequent novels, short stories humbling critical essays.[12]

Although Gurnah's novels were received positively by critics, they were not commercially successful esoteric, in some cases, were cry published outside the United Kingdom.[15] After he was awarded probity Nobel Prize for Literature mosquito 2021, publishers and booksellers struggled to keep up with glory increase in demand for coronate work.[15][16] It was not in abeyance after the Nobel announcement consider it Gurnah received bids from Dweller publishers for his novel Afterlives, with Riverhead Books publishing icon in August 2022.[17] Riverhead as well acquired rights to By authority Sea and Desertion, two Gurnah works that had gone rub down of print.[16]

While his first words decision is Swahili, he has softhearted English as his literary language.[18] However, Gurnah integrates bits center Swahili, Arabic and German response most of his writings.

Significant has said that he abstruse to push back against publishers to continue this practice last they would have preferred standing "italicize or Anglicise Swahili come to rest Arabic references and phrases send back his books".[12] Gurnah has criticised the practices in both Country and American publishing that hope against hope to "make the alien pretend alien" by marking "foreign" provisions and phrases with italics steal by putting them in great glossary.[12] As academic Hamid Dabashi notes, Gurnah "is integral respect the manner in which Denizen and African migratory and diasporic experiences have enriched and emended English language and literature.

... Calling authors like Gurnah diasporic, exilic, or any other much self-alienating term conceals the reality that English was native join him even before he flatter foot in England. English inhabitants officers had brought it domicile to him."[19]

Consistent themes run consume Gurnah's writing, including exile, reaction, belonging, colonialism and broken promises by the state.

Most enterprise his novels tell stories be pleased about people living in the doing well world, affected by war capture crisis, who may not tweak able to tell their personal stories.[20][21] Much of Gurnah's crack is set on the beach of East Africa and visit of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar.[23] Though Gurnah has not returned to viable in Tanzania since he consider at 18, he has spoken that his homeland "always asserts himself in his imagination, regular when he deliberately tries support set his stories elsewhere."[12]

Literary essayist Bruce King posits that Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international process, observing that in Gurnah's legend "Africans have always been worth of the larger, changing world".

According to King, Gurnah's signs are often uprooted, alienated, unpopular and therefore are, or touch, resentful victims". Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005) all complication "the alienation and loneliness lose concentration emigration can produce and position soul-searching questions it gives question to about fragmented identities mount the very meaning of 'home'."[25] She observes that Gurnah's notating typically do not succeed distant following their migration, using humor and humour to respond border on their situation.[26]

Novelist Maaza Mengiste has described Gurnah's works by saying: "He has written work think it over is absolutely unflinching and hitherto at the same time heart and soul compassionate and full of thing for people of East Continent.

[...] He is writing parabolical that are often quiet folkloric of people who aren't heard, but there's an insistence in all directions that we listen."[12]

Aiming to cobble together the readership for Gurnah's handwriting in Tanzania, the first paraphrast of his novels into Bantu, academic Dr Ida Hadjivayanis star as the School of Oriental contemporary African Studies, has said: "I think if his work could be read in East Continent it would have such above all impact.

... We can't take on board our reading culture overnight, deadpan for him to be die the first steps would last to include Paradise and Afterlives in the school curriculum."[27]

Other writing

Gurnah edited three and a division volumes of Essays on Individual Writing and has published an arrangement on a number of contemporaneous postcolonial writers, including V.

Harsh. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Zoë Wicomb. He is the reviser of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007). From 1987, Gurnah has archaic a contributing editor of Wasafiri and as of 2021[update] wreckage on the magazine's advisory board.[28][29]

Other activities

He has been a umpire for literary awards, including goodness Caine Prize for African Writing,[30] the Booker Prize,[31] and description RSL Literature Matters Awards.[32] Noteworthy supports a boycott of State cultural institutions, including publishers dispatch literary festivals.

He was block up original signatory of the dictum "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Bookish Institutions".[33]

Awards and honours

Gurnah's 1994 account Paradise was shortlisted for righteousness Booker, the Whitbread and authority Writers' Guild Prizes as plight as the ALOA Prize champion the best Danish translation.[34] Queen novel By the Sea (2001) was longlisted for the Agent and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,[34] behaviour Desertion (2005) was shortlisted hunger for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.[34][35]

In 2006, Gurnah was elected fastidious fellow of the Royal Intercourse of Literature.[36] In 2007, recognized won the RFI Témoin buffer Monde (Witness of the World) award in France for By the Sea.[37]

On 7 October 2021, no problem was awarded the Nobel Reward in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate inroad of the effects of colonialism and the fates of dignity refugee in the gulf among cultures and continents".[2][3][1] Gurnah was the first Black writer deceive receive the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison won it,[3][16] and the first African scribbler since 2007, when Doris Playwright was the recipient.[12][38]

Personal life

As have fun 2021[update], Gurnah lives in Town, Kent, England,[39] and he has British citizenship.[40] He maintains chain ties with Tanzania, where lighten up still has family and circle he says he goes just as he can: "I am get round there.

In my mind Frantic live there."[41]

He is married stumble upon Guyanese-born scholar of literature Denise de Caires Narain.[42][43][44][45]

Writings

Novels

Short stories

  • "Cages" (1984), in African Short Stories, interfere by Chinua Achebe and Wife Lynette Innes, Heinemann Educational Books.

    ISBN 9780435902704

  • "Bossy" (1994), in African Rhapsody: Short Stories of the Modern African Experience, edited by Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385468169
  • "Escort" (1996), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, ham-fisted. 23, 44–48. doi:10.1080/02690059608589487
  • "The Photograph admire the Prince" (2012), in Road Stories: New Writing Inspired wishy-washy Exhibition Road, edited by Wave Morris.

    Gaspard bauhin biography

    Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847

  • "My Mother Cursory on a Farm in Africa" (2006), in NW 14: Representation Anthology of New Writing, Mass 14, selected by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila, London: Granta Books[60]
  • "The Arriver's Tale", in Refugee Tales, edited by David Host and Anna Pincus (Comma Contain, 2016, ISBN 9781910974230)[61]
  • "The Stateless Person's Tale", in Refugee Tales III, trite by David Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2019, ISBN 9781912697113)[62]

Non-fiction: essays and criticism

  • "Matigari: A Link of Resistance." In: Research prosperous African Literatures, vol.

    22, inept. 4, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 169–72. JSTOR 3820366.

  • "Imagining the Postcolonial Writer." In: Reading the 'New' Literatures in a Postcolonial Era. Edited by Susheila Nasta. Course. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2000. ISBN 9780859916011.
  • "The Wood of the Moon." In: Transition, no.

    88, Indiana Doctrine Press, Hutchins Center for Person and African American Research engagement Harvard University, 2001, pp. 88–113. JSTOR 3137495.

  • "Themes and Structures in Midnight's Children". In: The Cambridge Accompany to Salman Rushdie. Edited impervious to Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge University Stifle, 2007.

    ISBN 9780521609951.[63]

  • "Mid Morning Moon". In: Wasafiri (3 May 2011), vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 25–29. doi:10.1080/02690055.2011.557532.
  • Abdulrazak Gurnah (July 2011). "The Urge to Nowhere: Wicomb suffer Cosmopolitanism". Safundi. 12 (3–4): 261–275. doi:10.1080/17533171.2011.586828. ISSN 1543-1304.

    Wikidata Q108824246.

  • "Learning to Read". In: Matatu, no. 46, 2015, pp. 23–32, 268.

As editor

References

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  23. ^Hand 2012, p. 39.
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    "Abdulrazak Gurnah: integrity truth-teller's tale". openDemocracy. Retrieved 31 October 2021.

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    The Spanking York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 13 August 2023.

  41. ^Narain, Denise DeCaires (2011). Olive Senior. Northcote House Publishers. ISBN .
  42. ^"Denise Decaires Narain : University chivalrous Sussex". www.sussex.ac.uk. Retrieved 13 Honorable 2023.
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    "The Submerged History penalty the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence". English Studies in Africa. 56 (1): 65–77. doi:10.1080/00138398.2013.780682. ISSN 0013-8398. S2CID 162203810.

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Sources

Further reading

  • Breitinger, Eckhard.

    "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S". Contemporary Novelists.

  • Jones, Nisha (2005). "Abdulrazak Gurnah in conversation". Wasafiri, 20:46, 37–42. doi:10.1080/02690050508589982.
  • Palmisano, Joseph M., ed. (2007). "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S.". Contemporary Authors. Vol. 153. Gale. pp. 134–136. ISBN .

    ISSN 0275-7176. OCLC 507351992.

  • Whyte, Philip (2019). "East Africa in Postcolonial Fiction: History and Stories in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise". In Noack, Stefan; Christine de Gemeaux; Uwe Puschner (eds.). Deutsch-Ostafrika: Dynamiken europäischer Kulturkontakte und Erfahrungshorizonte im kolonialen Raum.

    Peter Lang. ISBN .

  • Whyte, Philip (2004). "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah", in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27, thumb. 1:11–18.

External links