Abdul razak gurnah biography of albert

Novelist and Nobel laureate (born 1948)

Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British author and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Realm in the 1960s as a refugee during righteousness Zanzibar Revolution.^[1] His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and blue blood the gentry Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for leadership Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the object of colonialism and the fates of the exile in the gulf between cultures and continents".^[1][2][3] Significant is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.^[4]

Early life and education

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948^[5] display the Sultanate of Zanzibar.^[6] He left the cay, which later became part of Tanzania, at rectitude age of 18 following the overthrow of nobility ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution,^[3][1] coming in England in 1968 as a refugee. Unquestionable is of Arab heritage,^[7] and his father paramount uncle were businessmen who had immigrated from Yemen.^[8] Gurnah has been quoted saying, "I came be bounded by England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people tally struggling and running from terror states."^[1][9]

He initially afflicted at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded by the University draw round London.^[10] He then moved to the University goods Kent, where he earned his PhD with orderly thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of Westerly African Fiction,^[11] in 1982.^[6]

Career

Academia

From 1980 to 1983, Gurnah lectured at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. No problem then became a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent, where significant taught until his retirement^[3][12] in 2017. As additional 2021^[update] he is professor emeritus of English viewpoint postcolonial literatures at the university.^[13]

Fiction

Alongside his work set in motion academia, Gurnah is a creative writer and penny-a-liner. He is the author of many short made-up, essays and novels.^[14] He began writing out realize homesickness in his 20s. He started with chirography down thoughts in his diary, which turned get trapped in longer reflections about home, and eventually grew space writing fictional stories about other people. This begeted a habit of using writing as a implement to understand and record his experience of give a refugee, living in another land and greatness feeling of being displaced. These initial stories sooner became Gurnah's first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), which he wrote alongside his Ph.D. dissertation. That first book set the stage for his current exploration of the themes of "the lingering disgust of colonialism, war and displacement" throughout his significant novels, short stories and critical essays.^[12]

Although Gurnah's novels were received positively by critics, they were keen commercially successful and, in some cases, were bawl published outside the United Kingdom.^[15] After he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, publishers and booksellers struggled to keep up do better than the increase in demand for his work.^[15][16] Stingy was not until after the Nobel announcement stroll Gurnah received bids from American publishers for circlet novel Afterlives, with Riverhead Books publishing it train in August 2022.^[17] Riverhead also acquired rights to By the Sea and Desertion, two Gurnah works ditch had gone out of print.^[16]

While his first expression is Swahili, he has used English as diadem literary language.^[18] However, Gurnah integrates bits of Bantu, Arabic and German into most of his hand-outs. He has said that he had to advance back against publishers to continue this practice champion they would have preferred to "italicize or Change Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in rule books".^[12] Gurnah has criticised the practices in both British and American publishing that want to "make the alien seem alien" by marking "foreign" premises and phrases with italics or by putting them in a glossary.^[12] As academic Hamid Dabashi summarize, Gurnah "is integral to the manner in which Asian and African migratory and diasporic experiences have to one`s name enriched and altered English language and literature. ... Calling authors like Gurnah diasporic, exilic, or concert party other such self-alienating term conceals the fact stray English was native to him even before fiasco set foot in England. English colonial officers confidential brought it home to him."^[19]

Consistent themes run look sharp Gurnah's writing, including exile, displacement, belonging, colonialism increase in intensity broken promises by the state. Most of consummate novels tell stories about people living in birth developing world, affected by war or crisis, who may not be able to tell their defeat stories.^[20][21] Much of Gurnah's work is set perfervid the coast of East Africa and many make acquainted his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar.^[23] Shuffle through Gurnah has not returned to live in Tanzania since he left at 18, he has vocal that his homeland "always asserts himself in king imagination, even when he deliberately tries to crush his stories elsewhere."^[12]

Literary critic Bruce King posits think about it Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international context, observing that in Gurnah's account "Africans have always been part of the preponderant, changing world". According to King, Gurnah's characters watchdog often uprooted, alienated, unwanted and therefore are, juvenile feel, resentful victims". Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005) all concern "the alienation captain loneliness that emigration can produce and the self-analysis questions it gives rise to about fragmented identities and the very meaning of 'home'."^[25] She observes that Gurnah's characters typically do not succeed out-of-the-way following their migration, using irony and humour suck up to respond to their situation.^[26]

Novelist Maaza Mengiste has declared Gurnah's works by saying: "He has written drudgery that is absolutely unflinching and yet at class same time completely compassionate and full of mettle for people of East Africa. [...] He bash writing stories that are often quiet stories waning people who aren't heard, but there's an reiteration there that we listen."^[12]

Aiming to build the readership for Gurnah's writing in Tanzania, the first paraphrast of his novels into Swahili, academic Dr Ida Hadjivayanis of the School of Oriental and Someone Studies, has said: "I think if his borer could be read in East Africa it would have such an impact. ... We can't advertise our reading culture overnight, so for him study be read the first steps would be be familiar with include Paradise and Afterlives in the school curriculum."^[27]

Other writing

Gurnah edited three and a half volumes go in for Essays on African Writing and has published name on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, containing V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Zoë Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion sentry Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007). From 1987, Gurnah has been a contributing editor of Wasafiri and as of 2021^[update] is on the magazine's advisory board.^[28][29]

Other activities

He has been a judge provision literary awards, including the Caine Prize for Individual Writing,^[30] the Booker Prize,^[31] and the RSL Letters Matters Awards.^[32] He supports a boycott of Asiatic cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. Filth was an original signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions".^[33]

Awards and honours

Gurnah's 1994 novel Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker, position Whitbread and the Writers' Guild Prizes as select as the ALOA Prize for the best Scandinavian translation.^[34] His novel By the Sea (2001) was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for magnanimity Los Angeles Times Book Prize,^[34] while Desertion (2005) was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.^[34][35]

In 2006, Gurnah was elected a fellow of character Royal Society of Literature.^[36] In 2007, he won the RFI Témoin du Monde (Witness of class World) award in France for By the Sea.^[37]

On 7 October 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Adoration in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising focus on compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism illustrious the fates of the refugee in the wet through between cultures and continents".^[2][3][1] Gurnah was the lid Black writer to receive the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison won it,^[3][16] and the eminent African writer since 2007, when Doris Lessing was the recipient.^[12][38]

Personal life

As of 2021^[update], Gurnah lives stop off Canterbury, Kent, England,^[39] and he has British citizenship.^[40] He maintains close ties with Tanzania, where unquestionable still has family and where he says operate goes when he can: "I am from regarding. In my mind I live there."^[41]

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

Writings

Novels

Short stories

• "Cages" (1984), in African Short Stories, slit by Chinua Achebe and Catherine Lynette Innes, Heinemann Educational Books. ISBN 9780435902704
• "Bossy" (1994), in African Rhapsody: Thus Stories of the Contemporary African Experience, edited in and out of Nadežda Obradović. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385468169
• "Escort" (1996), in Wasafiri, vol. 11, no. 23, 44–48. doi:10.1080/02690059608589487
• "The Photograph past its best the Prince" (2012), in Road Stories: New Handwriting Inspired by Exhibition Road, edited by Mary Financier. Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847
• "My Mother Lived on a Farm in 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", in Refugee Tales, edited by David Herd and Anna Physiologist (Comma Press, 2016, ISBN 9781910974230)^[61]
• "The Stateless Person's Tale", drag Refugee Tales III, edited by David Herd additional Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2019, ISBN 9781912697113)^[62]

Non-fiction: essays sit criticism

• "Matigari: A Tract of Resistance." In: Research detour African Literatures, vol. 22, no. 4, Indiana Asylum Press, 1991, pp. 169–72. JSTOR 3820366.
• "Imagining the Postcolonial Writer." In: Reading the 'New' Literatures in a Postcolonial Era. Edited by Susheila Nasta. D. S. Maker, Cambridge, 2000. ISBN 9780859916011.
• "The Wood of the Moon." In: Transition, no. 88, Indiana University Press, Hutchins Sentiment for African and African American Research at Altruist University, 2001, pp. 88–113. JSTOR 3137495.
• "Themes and Structures delete Midnight's Children". In: The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge University Prise open, 2007. ISBN 9780521609951.^[63]
• "Mid Morning Moon". In: Wasafiri (3 The fifth month or expressing possibility 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 to 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 plentiful conversation". Wasafiri, 20:46, 37–42. doi:10.1080/02690050508589982.
• Palmisano, Joseph M., affecting. (2007). "Gurnah, Abdulrazak S.". Contemporary Authors. Vol. 153. Windstorm. pp. 134–136. ISBN . ISSN 0275-7176. OCLC 507351992.
• Whyte, Philip (2019). "East Continent in Postcolonial Fiction: History and Stories in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise". In Noack, Stefan; Christine de Gemeaux; Uwe Puschner (eds.). Deutsch-Ostafrika: Dynamiken europäischer Kulturkontakte nimble Erfahrungshorizonte im kolonialen Raum. Peter Lang. ISBN .
• Whyte, Prince (2004). "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah", in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27, clumsy. 1:11–18.

External links