Abdulrazak Gurnah is emeritus Professor of Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Kent and the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature.
Born in Zanzibar in 1948, the second of six children, Abdulrazak grew up in the dying days of the island’s status as a British protectorate before independence was declared in 1963. The revolution which followed made Zanzibar an undesirable and unsafe place to live in for young men of Arab heritage. In 1967, he left to seek opportunities in Britain.
He subsidised his studies through a series of low paid jobs which included strawberry picking, factory work and time as a hospital porter. In the evenings he was studying at night school and after gaining a PhD in English, he joined the University of Kent, eventually becoming a Professor.
Alongside his academic career, Abdulrazak was writing and it took him twelve years to find a publisher for his 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure.
He has published ten more novels since then, including 1994’s Paradise and 2001’s By the Sea (short and longlisted for the Booker Prize respectively) which explore themes of exile, displacement, belonging and colonialism. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work and “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
He lives in Kent, with his wife, the Guyanese-born scholar, Denise de Caires Narain.
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