Credits: writersmakeworlds, wikipedia
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 1948 in Zanzibar) is a Tanzanian novelist based in the United Kingdom. The most famous of his novels are Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize, Desertion (2005), and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Background and career
Born on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, Gurnah went to Britain as a student in 1968.
From 1980 to 1982, Gurnah lectured at the Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD in 1982. He is now a Professor and Director of Graduate studies there within the Department of English. His main academic interest is in postcolonial writing and in discourses associated with colonialism, especially as they relate to Africa, the Caribbean and India.
He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoë Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007).`He has served as a contributing editor to Wasafiri magazine since 1987.
Gurnah has supervised research projects on the writing of Rushdie, Naipaul, G. V. Desani, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid.
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