Abdulrazak Gurnah

Private Passions

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent.

He was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, and first came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 18, in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled how, even as a young schoolboy, he loved writing stories. He also reflected on how his move to England changed everything: "there", he said, "in my homesickness and amidst the anguish of a stranger’s life… I began to do a different kind of writing. There was a task to be done."

Abdulrazak's musical choices include Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Miles Davis and the Malian kora player, Toumani Diabaté.