Original version

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

The Documentary

Documentaries

Factual

Investigating global developments, issues and affairs.

BBC World Service

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service East Asia

The Documentary: This Cultural Life: Abdulrazak Gurnah

This Cultural Life: Abdulrazak Gurnah

25/01/2023 GMT

BBC World Service - The Documentary, This Cultural Life: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah on his cultural influences

Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah on his cultural influences.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah talks to John Wilson about the people, events, and cultural works that have inspired his creativity. Born in Zanzibar, the author and academic came to England as a political refugee at the age of 18, and now holds the post of Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Since his first book Memory of Departure in 1987, he has written 10 novels including Paradise, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. When he won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the citation praised his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Abdulrazak Gurnah discusses his childhood overlooking the main port in Zanzibar, and how his experience of multiple nationalities, cultures and languages inspired some of the themes of identity, belonging and departure that recur in his novels. He remembers the political turmoil and violence in the wake of the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar that saw the overthrow of the Sultan and imprisonment of the government. 

After travelling to the UK with his brother in 1968, he enrolled as a student in Canterbury, the town in which he still lives and works. Abdulrazak Gurnah also discusses the effect that winning the Nobel Prize has had on his life and work.

Presenter: John Wilson
Producer: Edwina Pitman

(Photo: Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah (C) attends the Nobel Prize award ceremony at the Concert Hall, Stockholm, Sweden, 10 December 2022. Credit: Christine Olsson/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Documentary

This Cultural Life: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Genres

Brand

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

About BBC World Service