‘Paradise’ by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The first Tanzanian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2021
Published 09.10.21, 06:48 AM
Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, has a stellar body of work to his name, including a Booker Prize nomination for his 1994 novel Paradise. Yet, it is only now that he became the first Black person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since Toni Morrison in 1993. Described by his editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, as “one of the greatest living African writers”, Gurnah has always written with power, nuance and compassion about displacement, colonialism, hidden histories and the fluid nature of identity. Of all his writing, Paradise stands out for the manner in which it turns Joseph Conrad’s journey to the “heart of darkness” on its head, and reconfigures it to be viewed through an east African lens.
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