Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a British-Tanzanian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. His fiction, including Afterlives and By the Sea, chronicles the lives of migrants, refugees and people of the East African coast, confronting the legacies of colonialism and displacement with unflinching compassion.

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah came to England as a refugee in the 1960s and later became a distinguished academic who taught for decades at the University of Kent. His novels are praised for their deep human richness, their refusal of easy categories, and their illumination of lives usually left out of the historical record.