Abdulrazak Gurnah
20 December 1948 – present
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic who left Zanzibar as a refugee in the late 1960s and settled in England. He taught English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent while writing novels such as Paradise, By the Sea and Afterlives, which examine displacement, colonialism and memory along the East African coast. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Abdulrazak Gurnah.
- Ada Yonath (1939–2026) Overlapped 78 years →
- Adonis (1930–present) Overlapped 78 years →
- Akira Yoshino (1948–present) Overlapped 78 years →
- Alex Ferguson (1941–present) Overlapped 78 years →
- Ali Khamenei (1939–2026) Overlapped 78 years →
- Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948–present) Overlapped 78 years →
Life events
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar, off the East African coast.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe arrived in Britain as a refugee following the persecution of Zanzibar's Arab population after the revolution.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe spent several years lecturing in Nigeria before returning to Britain for doctoral study.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHis PhD thesis addressed criteria in the criticism of West African fiction.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe novel followed a young man attempting to escape a coastal East African town.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHis fourth novel, set in East Africa before the First World War, reached the Booker shortlist.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe taught English and postcolonial literatures at Canterbury until his retirement.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe novel traced the lives of East Africans caught up in German colonial rule and the First World War.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe Swedish Academy cited his treatment of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.
Source: en.wikipedia.org