The Tanzanian, anglophone writer, born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, little translated in France, was distinguished by the Nobel Committee on Thursday. It is the fifth author of the African continent to be rewarded.
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If Africa was a favorite continent, this year, for the 114 e Literature Nobel Prize, the bettors expected the consecration of the Kenyan Nugi Wa Thiong’o writer. It is ultimately the novelist and university of Tanzanian origin Abdulrazak Gurnah who won, the Nobel Academy greeting, through his work, a “penetrating approach and without compromising the effects of colonialism as well as the fate of the rebate refugees between Cultures and continents “. Abdulrazak Gurnah succeeds the American poet Louise Glück, sacred in 2020. He is the fifth author of the African continent to receive the prestigious reward, and the first from South African J. Mr. Coetzee, in 2003.
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah written in English and lives in Great Britain where he found refuge in the late 1960s. After studying in England then in Nigeria, he became teacher at the University of Kent, in the city of Canterbury. He obtained a doctorate in 1982. Specialized in the English letters and postcolonial studies related to Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, he is the author of ten novels in English, including the last, afterlife (not Translated), in 2020, as well as a large number of scientific articles on authors from the former British Empire, such as Naipaul or Salman Rushdie.
The odyssey “Paradise”
In France, the Galade editions published in 2006 near the sea and Farewell Zanzibar in 2009. But it is mainly through paradise (Denoël, 1995, taken up in the “motif” collection of the feathered snake) that the Public will have had the opportunity to discover it for the first time, there is a quarter of a century ago.
In this painful odyssey, Abdulrazak Gurnah returned to the hectic history of the Tanganyika, former German Eastern Africa, under the mandate of the United Nations (UN), occupied by the British and gathered with Zanzibar to form Tanzania. He was mainly interested in the destinies of the most vulnerable individuals when history malmenes.
With the painful itinerary of the young Yusuf, sold by his father in settlement of a debt, then reduced in slavery by his uncle, then launched at the risk of his life on the road of the caravans, the writer painted a youth African constantly threatened by the changing interests of the powerful, the vicissitudes of political regimes and the chaos of time. Whole generations struggling between unacceptable resignation and ardent desire for revolt.
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