Winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” (Nobel Prize Committee).
Theft
In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, the master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
Afterlives
A sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.
By the sea
The consequences of an illicit love affair reverberate from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence.
DESERTION
Two immigrants’ conflicting stories about their common homeland reveal the buried truths that drove them from it.
Born in Zanzibar in 1954, the British artist Lubaina Himid tackles the legacy of colonialism, identity, and belonging. She is the first black woman and the oldest artist to be awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, which she received in 2017 at age 62.
© Lubaina Himid. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate.
Man in a Pyjama Drawer, 2021 (detail)
Acrylic on found wooden drawer
Private collection. © Lubaina Himid. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate.
Traditional Three-Tier Wedding Cake, 2019 (detail)
Acrylic on canvas
Private collection. © Lubaina Himid. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate.
Her Print on Me, 2017 (detail)
Acrylic on canvas
Photo: © Mark Pringle
The winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
“One of the great writers of our time.” – BOOKLIST, STARRED REVIEW
“A master storyteller.” – FINANCIAL TIMES
“Gurnah’s greatest act of love and artistry: his ability to gather the fragments of broken lives and create a breathtaking mosaic in print.” – WASHINGTON POST
“While [Gurnah’s] books may center on particular African communities and events, what has earned him the highest of accolades is his attention to universality.” – LOS ANGELES TIMES
"[Gurnah] is a novelist nonpareil, a master of the art form who understands human failings in conflicts both political and intimate.” – NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Gurnah’s harrowing fiction explores storytelling as a mode of survival… Those we lose don’t always return—and it’s precisely for this reason, Gurnah suggests, that we must welcome strangers and their tales.” – THE NEW YORKER
“Gurnah masterfully shows how the effects of colonialism ripple and disrupt decades after the fact.” – BUZZFEED
“At the heart of what propels Gurnah’s fiction: the impossibility of belonging, and the way rootlessness thwarts a sense of a real future anywhere.” – HARPER’S MAGAZINE
“Makes one feel not as though one is reading historical fiction, safely bracketed off from our present, but a work set dimly in a future to which we are uneasily connected… For a reader truly hungry about the world, all this comes across as tremendously absorbing… powerfully contemporary.” – NEW REPUBLIC
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