New Delhi. Colonialism may be limited to a certain period of time, but the society preserves the memories of its bite for a long time and this year the black writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who has received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in fact his creative world also articulates the sensitivity of those memories. gives.
On 7 October, when someone told Gurnaah that he had been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the first thing that came to his mind was that it was a farce or a joke. But it is a fact. The biggest truth of 2021 for literature around the world.
Gurnaah was born on 20 December 1948 in Janjabir, now in Tanzania. A revolution took place in Janjabir in the 1960s, in which people of Arab origin were oppressed. Under those circumstances, 18-year-old Gurnaah had to be displaced in compulsion and come to Britain.
As a refugee in England, he started writing at the age of 21 and made English the language of writing while his mother tongue was Swahili. The pains of displacement can be felt very well in the literary world of Gurnaah.
Gurnah’s first novel “Memory of Departure” was published in 1987. What writing meant to Gurnaah can be better understood in his words, “What drives the whole writing experience for me is the thought of losing your place in the world. ”
Gurnah said that the themes of displacement and migration he explored in his writings come to the fore every day. He said that he came to Britain after being displaced in the 1960s and today this thing is more visible than before.
He said, “People are dying, getting injured all over the world. We must deal with these issues with utmost compassion.” Gurnaah’s novel ‘Paradise’ was selected for the Booker Prize in 1994. He has written a total of 10 novels.
Gurnah has become the fifth African author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Earlier, Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Egypt’s Nagib Mahfouz, South Africa’s Nadine Gardimer and Jan M Kotzi have received this honor. Seventy-year-old Gurnah recently retired from his service as a professor of post-colonial literature at Britain’s University of Kent.
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