Paradise: A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

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Themes and Structures in Midnight's Children". In: The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780521609951. [63]

a b Alter, Alexandra (27 October 2021). "He Won the Nobel. Why Are His Books So Hard to Find?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 27 October 2021. Hand, Felicity. "Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948–)". The Literary Encyclopedia (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 June 2018 . Retrieved 7 October 2021. Dabashi, Hamid (12 October 2021). "This one for Africa: The Nobel Prize ennobles itself". Al Jazeera . Retrieved 2 November 2021. The Photograph of the Prince" (2012), in Road Stories: New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road, edited by Mary Morris. Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London. ISBN 9780954984847 Attree, Lizzy (7 October 2021). "Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah: An introduction to the man and his writing". The World . Retrieved 10 October 2021.Mengiste, Maaza (8 October 2021). "Abdulrazak Gurnah: where to start with the Nobel prize winner". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 9 October 2021 . Retrieved 9 October 2021. It’s not always asylum seeking, it can be so many reasons, it can be trade, it can be commerce, it can be education, it can be love,” she said. “The first of his novels I took on at Bloomsbury is called By the Sea, and there’s this haunting image of a man at Heathrow airport with a carved incense box, and that’s all he has. He arrives, and he says one word, and that’s ‘asylum’.”

Novelist Maaza Mengiste has described Gurnah's works by saying: "He has written work that is absolutely unflinching and yet at the same time completely compassionate and full of heart for people of East Africa. [...] He is writing stories that are often quiet stories of people who aren’t heard, but there’s an insistence there that we listen." [12] Hand, Felicity (2012). "Becoming Foreign: Tropes of Migrant Identity in Three Novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah". In Sell, Jonathan P. A. (ed.). Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. Palgrave Macmillan. pp.39–58. doi: 10.1057/9780230358454_3. ISBN 978-1-349-33956-3. Bosman, Sean James (26 August 2021). "Abdulrazak Gurnah". Rejection of Victimhood in Literature by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Brill. pp.36–72. doi: 10.1163/9789004469006_003. ISBN 978-90-04-46900-6. S2CID 241357989. Whyte, Philip (2004). "Heritage as Nightmare: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah", in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27, no. 1:11–18. One of my favourites is Gurnah’s latest novel ‘Afterlives’ (2020), which has many affinities with his fourth, breakthrough novel, ‘Paradise’ (1994), and takes place during the German colonisation of East Africa in the beginning of the 20th century and thereafter. In both cases Gurnah gives us a lucid history lesson in the form of a captivating story of individual lives. His way of doing this is to filter the brutality of events through young and vulnerable protagonists with limited consciousness of reality. In the breaking up of Arab hegemony in the coastal region of East Africa we follow the dramatic fates of the orphaned youngsters Ilyas, Afiya and Hamza. Ilyas escapes his servitude under an Arab slave holder only to be kidnapped by the German forces as one of their native soldiers (askaris). Even Hamza is owned by a merchant in a caravan only to volunteer as a German askari, where he becomes dependent on an officer who sexually exploits him. The capricious winds of history rule, and the fates of the trio are very different. Gurnah’s style is wonderfully clear and nuanced, but he can also be sarcastic and hilarious in a deadpan way. One of the finest moments in this novel is the delicately written love story of Hamza and Ilyas’ sister Afyia, a variation on Pyramus and Thisbe. The last word however must be terrible, when the Nazi engagement of Ilyas is revealed, and the denouement of ‘Afterlives’ is just as unexpected as it is alarming. If Hamza is saved, Ilyas is not. What happens to him I will let the reader find out.

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a b c Alter, Alexandra (5 November 2021). "Why one Nobel Laureate is struggling to sell books in America". The Independent. Archived from the original on 5 November 2021. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948 [5] in the Sultanate of Zanzibar. [6] He left the island, which later became part of Tanzania, at the age of 18 following the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution, [3] [1] arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee. He is of Arab heritage, [7] and his father and uncle were businessmen who had immigrated from Yemen. [8] Gurnah has been quoted saying, "I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states." [1] [9]