In October 2021, when author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for his work, which the Swedish Academy described as an “unrelenting and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”, he was in the midst of “writing something”. “Since this award, most of the time, I am either talking to reporters or meeting people, so not much has been written. Awards have a global impact and everyone wants to talk to you, publishers like you to promote new editions that are coming out in new languages. After all this, I am going to do what I have been doing for the last 40 years,” he says.
About a week ago, at the Dhaka Lit Festival, Gurnah chatted about his childhood, education and writing with Alexandra Pringle, who has edited several of his books. Alexandra will join him for a session on life writing titled ‘The Essential Abdulrazak Gurnah’ at the upcoming Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. He will be joined by Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple and Sanjay Roy for the keynote address on Thursday. “I have heard a lot about the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Pink City; So, I am looking forward to watching that,” he shares.
Gurnah fled Zanzibar as a teenager following the 1964 revolution. He moved to the United Kingdom as a refugee and now lives in Canterbury as a British citizen. His strikingly formidable works include memory of departure, pilgrim’s way, doty, paradise, sea shore, desertification, and most recent, later life, which examines German colonial power in East Africa and the lives of Tanganyikans – as they work, grieve and love – under the specter of war. “All of these books explore the many dimensions of what I think is one of the phenomena of our time – displaced people who find themselves, not necessarily always comfortably, living in places other than their ancestral homes. And I’ve always been interested in how people deal with events that are either stressful or traumatic, and how it is that they can get something out of these situations, from these moments,” he says.
For Gurnah, his experiences are intrinsic to the kind of writing he is involved in. “Past experiences are always factored into my writing, which doesn’t write as a genre,” he says. Gurnah mentions that there is a growing number of interesting writers, especially from India, Africa and the Caribbean. “Those are the areas I know most about. I think it’s a great time for writers in terms of finding publishers, audiences, listening, telling each other and the world about our circumstances.
But when it comes to reading, Gurnah says she doesn’t have hard lines. “I don’t read crime novels. I don’t usually read memoirs. I don’t read books that want to transport me to a different world, like you did. But I don’t think I have too many restrictions. I think Some books maybe because the language is not very engaging or too cliched, I leave, but I don’t draw the line that way,” he says. “Of course, there are millions of books made almost every week. Now I It doesn’t even take much hustle because so many people send me books. I’m being invited to participate in readings in a way that’s interesting and a little bit demanding because[there’s]so much to do.
Simply put, writing for Gurnah is a long process. His last book was published in 2020, a year before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But how long does it take to write a book?
Gurnah picks a story from an idea, which can span months or even years. Meanwhile, he is doing other things. “These thoughts are somewhere in the queue. It takes months, sometimes years, for an idea to materialize. And maybe by the time I finish, it’s already turning into something else,” he signs off.