Public Lecture: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah fled his homeland of Zanzibar during the Zanzibar Revolution in the 1960s and sought refuge in the UK as an eighteen-year-old. His ten novels include Paradise (1994); which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’ Gurnah’s works lyrically evoke Zanzibar and Africa more broadly as the centre of cross-cultural encounters that have spanned centuries. In this lecture, he will consider the idea of the South, and why it has become important.