Abdulrazak Gurnah: the refugee's crossing between worlds

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist who was born on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. When he was eighteen, a violent revolution forced him to leave his home, and he arrived in England in 1968 as a refugee. He had to build a new life in a country that often did not want him.

Years later, out of homesickness, he began writing stories in English about people like himself: people who had left one place and never quite arrived in another. He writes about what European empires did to East Africa, and about how it feels to be a stranger far from where you were born. Over ten novels that work made him one of the great writers of leaving home, and in 2021 it won him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gurnah was born in 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, into a family of Yemeni Arab descent. In 1964 a revolution overthrew the island's Arab elite, thousands of people were killed, and Gurnah fled, reaching England in 1968. He settled into a long career as a literary scholar at the University of Kent, where he is now an emeritus professor of English and postcolonial literatures. His fiction grew out of that exile. As the Swedish Academy put it, the disruption of the refugee runs throughout his work.

What set him apart was the angle he wrote from. East Africa had long been described by Europeans, from the outside. Gurnah deliberately upends that colonial perspective and writes from the side of the people the empires acted upon. He recovers a Swahili coast that had its own trade, faith, and languages long before the colonisers arrived.

In novels such as Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001), silence becomes the refugee's defence. A narrator hides his Zanzibar past from his English family and invents a more convenient life story, a deception that slowly corrodes him. His 2020 novel Afterlives returns to the world of Paradise, following East Africans caught up as soldiers in Germany's colonial wars, and traces the damage across several generations.

Gurnah belongs to a foundational generation of postcolonial writers who reached Britain from the edges of the empire, alongside figures such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and the young V. S. Naipaul. He arrived in the late 1960s, at the height of anti-immigrant feeling, the years of Enoch Powell's notorious speeches. That hostility is woven through his fiction, where characters who cross the world for safety or study still meet the old racist invective in the streets of London.

His method is patient and oblique. He writes in English, his second language after Kiswahili, and consciously breaks with the colonial novel by refusing its outside gaze. Memory is the engine of the work: his stories are told from exile but reach back constantly to the coast he left. He uses recurring devices, among them the changing of characters' names, to show identities being remade by migration, war, and the demands of strangers.

The choice carried weight beyond literary craft. Gurnah was the first Black writer to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and the award landed in the middle of fierce European arguments about refugees and borders. By insisting on the inner life and dignity of the displaced, his fiction offers a direct counter to the political language that reduces them to a problem at the gate.

“What you don't know in those situations is what it is that you're giving up, that you're leaving behind. So going to England was like an adventure in some ways, but it was also a great loss.”Abdulrazak Gurnah, recalling his 1968 arrival in England