Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury.
Praise for Abdulrazak Gurnah: 'Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair * THE TIMES * Gurnah gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure -- MAAZE MENGISTE * GUARDIAN * A master storyteller * FINANCIAL TIMES * A powerfully evocative oeuvre that keeps coming back to the same questions, in spare, graceful prose, about the ties that bind and the ties that fray * DAILY TELEGRAPH * A real writer, someone with something to say about the world * OBSERVER * A captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and departure . reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide * GUARDIAN * One of Africa's greatest living writers -- GILES FODEN