DID YOU KNOW? for June 21 - July 4, 2022:  

Did You Know…The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah who was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania and now teaches and writes in Canterbury, England.  The Swedish Academy cited 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”.

Gurnah is the first Black writer to receive the Literature Nobel since Toni Morrison in 1993. Gurnah has written 10 novels, including 1994’s Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and 2001’s By the Sea, longlisted for the Booker.

Gurnah’s writing is noted for pushing back against previous Western takes on the African continent.  He has said that "the exclusion of non-European people from certain kinds of recognitions, or the exclusion of women from certain kinds of recognitions, is only just now beginning to become an issue or a thing people are concerned to put right", and added that the world was changing.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels

·       Memory of Departure (1987)

·       Pilgrims Way (1988)

·       Dottie (1990)

·       Paradise (1994) (shortlisted for the Booker Prizeand the Whitbread Prize)

·       Admiring Silence (1996)

·       By the Sea (2001) (longlisted for the Booker Prize and
                           shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)

·       Desertion (2005)

·       The Last Gift (2011)

·       Gravel Heart (2017)

·       Afterlives (2020)

Learn more…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrazak_Gurnah