Abdulrazak Gurnah receives Nobel Prize for Literature | Free press

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Brighton (dpa) – Comes from Zanzibar, has been in Great Britain since the 1960s, professor at the University of Kent, lives in Brighton: There are only snippets of a life that are known about Nobel laureate in literature Abdulrazak Gurnah.

With the author, born in 1948, the Swedish Academy will select an almost unknown person on Thursday in Stockholm. Although he has lived in Great Britain for decades, few know him there either. The writer has already published ten novels and numerous short stories. His ex-university, his Bloomsbury publishing house – they are overrun with inquiries.

One thing is clear: Gurnah is the first Tanzanian author to receive the Nobel Prize and the first black African writer since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Although largely unknown, the award was long overdue, according to Alexandra Pringle, his longtime publisher at Bloomsbury. “He is one of the most important living African writers, and no one has ever taken notice of him,” says Pringle, as the Guardian reports. “That almost killed me.” She recently said in a podcast that Gurnah is always overlooked. “And now this.”

Surprised and a little shocked

“I’m really, really surprised,” the newly crowned Nobel Prize winner told BBC radio on Thursday and laughed sheepishly. “And a little shocked.” He trembled when he heard about the price.

The subject of the former professor of English and post-colonial literature is the story of his old homeland Zanzibar and his new homeland England. Strongly influenced by the impressions of the brutal German colonial rule and the First World War in German East Africa, Gurnah tells of ordinary people. His most recent book “Afterlives”, for example, is about the young Ilyas, who was stolen from his parents by German troops and who years later returns to his home village to fight against his own people.

Gurnah has always written about displacement, says Pringle, “but in the most beautiful and haunting way about what uproots people and blows them across continents.” It seems a bit as if his own story is playing into his literature. Because Gurnah also experienced displacement.

In 1964, after a revolution in Zanzibar, which is now part of Tanzania, he was forced to leave his homeland as a young person. The Arab elite, which ruled the African majority in Zanzibar for 200 years, was overthrown. Massacres followed. At the age of 21, having now arrived in England, Gurnah began to write, in English and not in his native Swahili. His first short story “Memory of Departure” was published in 1987. It was not until 20 years after his escape, in 1984, that Gurnah was able to return to Zanzibar to see his dying father again.

It is difficult for him to describe himself, Gurnah said in an interview in 2016. Does he write post-colonial or world literature? “I wouldn’t choose any of these words,” he said. “In fact, I’m not sure if I would call myself anything else than my name. (…) Exactly, I don’t want this part of me to have a reduced name. “

Subtle humor

From the point of view of his German translator Thomas Brückner, Gurnah’s novels are characterized by a subtle sense of humor. “There are difficult authors who can or must be translated. And there are some that are much easier to translate because the literary content is lightweight. In this respect he is a serious and serious author. “

«I was very fortunate to be able to ask him again and again when a few things were unclear to me. He responded very kindly. Since the translation into German is often not done until years later, I had to listen to it more often: I don’t know anymore, ”says Brückner.

Comparisons are always difficult, publisher Pringle thinks of the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, who is considered the father of modern African literature. Gurnah writes “particularly beautiful and serious, but also humorous, amiable and sensitive,” she says. “For me he is an exceptional writer who writes about really important things.”

Gurnah was in his kitchen when the Nobel Prize Committee reached him, according to the Academy’s Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson. The committee had a “long and very positive” conversation with him. “Everything shifts in Gurnah’s literary universe – memories, names, identities,” says Olsson. “This is probably because his project cannot finally be completed.” It’s an exploration that never ends.

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