by Claire Chambers
I was delighted to learn that Abdulrazak Gurnah had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On 7 October 2021 it was announced that the prize had been bestowed on Prof Gurnah for‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’
My immediate thought after finding out that he had won this ultimate literary accolade was that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more grounded writer. In a Tweet that went semi-viral, another colleague, Dr Michael Collins who now works at King’s College London, encapsulated widespread feelings of surprised glee that a man of Gurnah’s humility whose writing is not widely known had won the £840,000: ‘My former colleague at Kent just won the Nobel Prize in Literature! I once hit him with a door’. This humorously bathetic post made me think of the photograph I took to accompany an interview I did with Prof Gurnah over a decade ago, for my book British Muslim Fictions (2011). In it, Gurnah is tall and dignified, his white hair distinguished over a dark suit jacket and light button-up shirt. What interests me, though, is the humble backdrop. Gurnah stands in front of an ugly Brutalist building at the University of Kent, where he works as Professor of Postcolonial Literature. In the foreground are garish plastic safety barriers, temporarily fencing off some roadworks. This, then, is a novelist whose high standards for his writing never shade into elitism or pretentiousness.
I wrote to congratulate him on this richly-deserved achievement. In these dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, it felt great to have some good news to celebrate for a change. As well as our interview, we had got to know each other a bit more at a talk of his which I moderated at Nottingham Contemporary in 2013. In this post, I would like to provide some short reflections about his body of fiction, reflections which are informed by the interview and talk. Read more »