Nobel Literature 2021, who is the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah

The British naturalized Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, was born on the island of Zanzibar in 1948 and has lived in England since 1968, where he first went to study and where he later became a professor of English literature at the University. of Kent. Considered one of the most brilliant authors of post-colonial African literature, he is the author of acclaimed novels such as “Il desertore”, “Paradiso” and “Sulla riva del mare”, published in Italian by Garzanti. The English-speaking narrator established himself with the novel “Paradise” (1994), with which he was in the final at the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize. “Desertion” (2005) and “By the Sea” (2001) were selected for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Born on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, Gurnah went to Great Brittany as a student in 1968. From 1980 to 1982 he taught at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD in 1982 and was then appointed Professor and Head of the English Department. As a scholar he has devoted himself to research on postcolonial fiction and issues associated with colonialism, especially with regard to Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has edited two volumes of “Essays on African Writing” and has published articles on several writers contemporary postcolonials, including VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoë Wicomb. He is editor of “A Companion to Salman Rushdie” (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has collaborated with “Wasafiri” magazine since 1987. Gurnah has supervised university research projects on the fiction of Rushdie, Naipaul, GV Desani, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid.