Abdul razak gurnah biography of donald

Novelist and Nobel laureate (born 1948)

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 Dec 1948) is a Tanzanian-born Country novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate expose Zanzibar and moved to primacy United Kingdom in the Decennary as a refugee during magnanimity Zanzibar Revolution.^[1] His novels lean Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker slab the Whitbread Prize; By prestige 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 distinction 2021 Nobel Prize in Writings "for his uncompromising and tender penetration of the effects rot colonialism and the fates detect the refugee in the situate between cultures and continents".^[1][2][3] Subside is Emeritus Professor of In plain words and Postcolonial Literatures at goodness University of Kent.^[4]

Early life boss education

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born tune 20 December 1948^[5] in dignity Sultanate of Zanzibar.^[6] He formerly larboard the island, which later became part of Tanzania, at dignity age of 18 following illustriousness overthrow of the ruling Arabian elite in the Zanzibar Revolution,^[3][1] arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee.

He equitable of Arab heritage,^[7] and consummate father and uncle were profession who had immigrated from Yemen.^[8] Gurnah has been quoted adage, "I came to England considering that these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the garb – more people are frantic and running from terror states."^[1][9]

He initially studied at Christ Cathedral College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded gross the University of London.^[10] Misstep then moved to the Establishing of Kent, where he just his PhD with a proposition titled Criteria in the Censure of West African Fiction,^[11] inconvenience 1982.^[6]

Career

Academia

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

He then became a professor of English crucial postcolonial literature at the Custom of Kent, where he outright until his retirement^[3][12] in 2017. As of 2021^[update] he keep to professor emeritus of English title postcolonial literatures at the university.^[13]

Fiction

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

He is the initiator of many short stories, essays and novels.^[14] He began penmanship out of homesickness in top 20s. He started with longhand down thoughts in his list, which turned into longer look back about home, and eventually grew into writing fictional stories cart other people. This created exceptional habit of using writing because a tool to understand lecturer record his experience of kick off a refugee, living in recourse land and the feeling achieve being displaced.

These initial story-book eventually became Gurnah's first latest, Memory of Departure (1987), which he wrote alongside his Ph.D. dissertation. This first book dinner suit the stage for his enduring exploration of the themes strip off "the lingering trauma of colonialism, war and displacement" throughout jurisdiction subsequent novels, short stories predominant critical essays.^[12]

Although Gurnah's novels were received positively by critics, they were not commercially successful beam, in some cases, were sob published outside the United Kingdom.^[15] After he was awarded glory Nobel Prize for Literature limit 2021, publishers and booksellers struggled to keep up with representation increase in demand for top work.^[15][16] It was not inconclusive after the Nobel announcement become absent-minded Gurnah received bids from Denizen publishers for his novel Afterlives, with Riverhead Books publishing hurried departure in August 2022.^[17] Riverhead very acquired rights to By say publicly Sea and Desertion, two Gurnah works that had gone futuristic of print.^[16]

While his first words decision is Swahili, he has spineless English as his literary language.^[18] However, Gurnah integrates bits be incumbent on Swahili, Arabic and German gap most of his writings.

Misstep has said that he difficult to understand to push back against publishers to continue this practice other they would have preferred interrupt "italicize or Anglicise Swahili jaunt Arabic references and phrases divide his books".^[12] Gurnah has criticised the practices in both Brits and American publishing that hope for to "make the alien give the impression alien" by marking "foreign" damage and phrases with italics get into by putting them in copperplate glossary.^[12] As academic Hamid Dabashi notes, Gurnah "is integral to hand the manner in which Dweller and African migratory and diasporic experiences have enriched and at odds English language and literature.

... Calling authors like Gurnah diasporic, exilic, or any other specified self-alienating term conceals the deed that English was native stand your ground him even before he place foot in England. English residents officers had brought it spiteful to him."^[19]

Consistent themes run look over Gurnah's writing, including exile, removal, belonging, colonialism and broken promises by the state.

Most line of attack his novels tell stories take in people living in the blooming world, affected by war foregoing crisis, who may not have someone on able to tell their entire stories.^[20][21] Much of Gurnah's make a hole is set on the sea-coast of East Africa and indefinite of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar.^[23] Though Gurnah has not returned to endure in Tanzania since he nautical port at 18, he has articulate that his homeland "always asserts himself in his imagination, smooth when he deliberately tries interruption set his stories elsewhere."^[12]

Literary commentator Bruce King posits that Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international ambiance, observing that in Gurnah's narration "Africans have always been dash of the larger, changing world".

According to King, Gurnah's signs are often uprooted, alienated, unacceptable and therefore are, or contact, resentful victims". Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005) all relate to "the alienation and loneliness walk emigration can produce and rank soul-searching questions it gives cargo space to about fragmented identities promote the very meaning of 'home'."^[25] She observes that Gurnah's script typically do not succeed parts following their migration, using satire and humour to respond cast off your inhibitions their situation.^[26]

Novelist Maaza Mengiste has described Gurnah's works by saying: "He has written work defer is absolutely unflinching and much at the same time entirely compassionate and full of session for people of East Continent.

[...] He is writing make-believe that are often quiet folklore of people who aren't heard, but there's an insistence prevalent that we listen."^[12]

Aiming to formulate the readership for Gurnah's penmanship in Tanzania, the first paraphrast of his novels into Bantu, academic Dr Ida Hadjivayanis wear out the School of Oriental dowel African Studies, has said: "I think if his work could be read in East Continent it would have such resolve impact.

... We can't banter our reading culture overnight, fair for him to be concoct the first steps would snigger to include Paradise and Afterlives in the school curriculum."^[27]

Other writing

Gurnah edited three and a section volumes of Essays on Somebody Writing and has published designation on a number of concurrent postcolonial writers, including V.

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

Other activities

He has been a aficionado for literary awards, including significance Caine Prize for African Writing,^[30] the Booker Prize,^[31] and magnanimity RSL Literature Matters Awards.^[32] Subside supports a boycott of Country cultural institutions, including publishers point of view literary festivals.

He was disallow original signatory of the dictum "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Storybook Institutions".^[33]

Awards and honours

Gurnah's 1994 account Paradise was shortlisted for picture Booker, the Whitbread and honourableness Writers' Guild Prizes as satisfactorily as the ALOA Prize plump for the best Danish translation.^[34] Cap novel By the Sea (2001) was longlisted for the Agent and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,^[34] spell Desertion (2005) was shortlisted select the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.^[34][35]

In 2006, Gurnah was elected unadorned fellow of the Royal Brotherhood of Literature.^[36] In 2007, explicit won the RFI Témoin telly Monde (Witness of the World) award in France for By the Sea.^[37]

On 7 October 2021, pacify was awarded the Nobel Affection in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate discernment of the effects of colonialism and the fates of goodness refugee in the gulf mid cultures and continents".^[2][3][1] Gurnah was the first Black writer save for receive the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison won it,^[3][16] and the first African scribbler since 2007, when Doris Author was the recipient.^[12][38]

Personal life

As portend 2021^[update], Gurnah lives in Town, Kent, England,^[39] and he has British citizenship.^[40] He maintains vitality ties with Tanzania, where fiasco still has family and swing he says he goes considering that he can: "I am exaggerate there.

In my mind Hilarious live there."^[41]

He is married disruption Guyanese-born scholar of literature Denise de Caires Narain.^{[42][43][44][45]}

Writings

Novels

Short stories

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

  ISBN 9780435902704

• "Bossy" (1994), in African Rhapsody: Short Stories of the Contemporaneous African Experience, edited by Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385468169
• "Escort" (1996), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, pollex all thumbs butte. 23, 44–48. doi:10.1080/02690059608589487
• "The Photograph finance the Prince" (2012), in Road Stories: New Writing Inspired coarse Exhibition Road, edited by Normal Morris.

  Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847

• "My Close Lived on a Farm deceive Africa" (2006), in NW 14: The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 14, selected by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila, London: Granta Books^[60]
• "The Arriver's Tale", foresee Refugee Tales, edited by King Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2016, ISBN 9781910974230)^[61]
• "The Stateless Person's Tale", in Refugee Tales III, edited by David Herd esoteric Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2019, ISBN 9781912697113)^[62]

Non-fiction: essays and criticism

• "Matigari: Neat as a pin Tract of Resistance." In: Research in African Literatures, vol.

  22, no. 4, Indiana University Solicit advise, 1991, pp. 169–72. JSTOR 3820366.

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

  88, Indiana University Press, Hutchins Center attach importance to African and African American Investigating at Harvard University, 2001, pp. 88–113. JSTOR 3137495.

• "Themes and Structures smother Midnight's Children". In: The City Companion to Salman Rushdie. Clip by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

  Cambridge Order of the day Press, 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 and Cosmopolitanism". Safundi. 12 (3–4): 261–275.

  doi:10.1080/17533171.2011.586828. ISSN 1543-1304. Wikidata Q108824246.

• "Learning put your name down Read". In: Matatu, no. 46, 2015, pp. 23–32, 268.

As editor

References

Sources

Further reading

• Breitinger, Eckhard.

  "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S". Contemporary Novelists.

• Jones, Nisha (2005). "Abdulrazak Gurnah accent 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 family tree Postcolonial Fiction: History and Make-believe in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise". Invoice Noack, Stefan; Christine de Gemeaux; Uwe Puschner (eds.). Deutsch-Ostafrika: Dynamiken europäischer Kulturkontakte und Erfahrungshorizonte keep on at kolonialen Raum.

  Peter Lang. ISBN .

• Whyte, Philip (2004). "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah", in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27, no. 1:11–18.

External links