Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nobel Prize for Literature, novelist of wars, migration and the plagues of colonialism – Le Monde

We were expecting Africa, and even East Africa. For this 114^e Nobel Prize for Literature, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o looked like a favorite. But it was aiming a bit high on the map. And count without the taste for the surprise of the Swedish jurors.

Thursday October 7, it is the novelist and scholar of Tanzanian origin Abdulrazak Gurnah who won. The Nobel Academy distinguished him for his “Penetrating and uncompromising analysis of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees torn between cultures and continents”. Ironically, having sat with him on the jury for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in London in 2008, we discovered that Gurnah is also a wa Thiong’o specialist.

At 72 years old, Abdulrazak Gurnah succeeds the American poet Louise Glück, crowned in 2020. After Wole soyinka (Nigeria, 1986), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt, 1988), Nadine gordimer (South Africa, 1991) and JM Coetzee (South Africa, 2003), he is the fifth writer of African origin to receive this award. A very British African. Because – even if he says he wants to situate his prose in the “Imaginative landscape of another culture”, and if he slips into his English touches of Swahili, Arabic or German – Gurnah remains an English language and course. Now living in Brighton (Sussex), he has spent three quarters of his life in Great Britain.

Like his hero Saleh Omar, in Near the sea (Galaade, 2007, RFI Témoin du monde prize), Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar. Like him too, he found refuge in the United Kingdom. It was at the end of the 1960s. The writer, born in 1948, was then in his twenties. After studying in Great Britain and Nigeria, he became a teacher at the University of Kent, where he obtained a doctorate in 1982. Specializing in English literature and postcolonial studies related to Africa, the Caribbean and the sub-region. Continent of India, he is the author of ten novels, of which only three have been translated into French. As well as numerous academic articles on authors from the former British Empire – VS Naipaul or even Salman Rushdie, to whom he devoted a meticulous analysis, A Companion to Salman Rushdie, released in 2007 by Cambridge University Press.

Master in the art of variation

In France, readers had the opportunity to discover it for the first time a quarter of a century ago. In Paradise (Denoël, 1995, included in the “Motifs” collection of the Plumed Serpent in 1999), Abdulrazak Gurnah looks back on the consequences of the turbulent history of Tanganyika, former German East Africa, placed under a UN mandate, occupied by the British, then reunited with the former sultanate which became the People’s Republic of Zanzibar, to constitute Tanzania.

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