Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948)

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and was sixteen when the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 transformed his island and eventually forced him to leave it. He arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, studied literature, and became a professor at the University of Kent. He has lived there ever since.

His novels are written in the neutral English of an educated man who learned the language formally and has spent a lifetime understanding what that neutrality conceals. He writes about people who carry two worlds inside them and find neither whole: the world they left, which is now inaccessible, and the world they arrived in, which does not quite let them belong.

The peripheral experience — the refugee, the immigrant, the one who arrived from somewhere else — is not peripheral in his work. It is where the twentieth century is most honestly visible.

He received the Nobel Prize in 2021. Many readers had never heard of him. The surprise was a form of proof.

His Nobel Lecture (2021) is called "Writing", and it begins: "Writing has always been a pleasure." It ends up somewhere harder — in what it meant to grow up with a colonised education in Zanzibar. Read it at NobelPrize.org.