BEIJING: Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is visiting China for the first time.
The Tanzanian-born British novelist arrived in Shanghai on March 5. In the week’s time during his stay in China, he will visit Shanghai, Ningbo of Zhejiang province, and Beijing, when he will give lectures, talk with Chinese writers and communicate with Chinese readers at a series of book club activities.
The 76-year-old writer has created 10 novels, all published in Chinese by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. In 2021 he was award the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Winning the Nobel Prize has made no difference in his life as “it was not in my mind, not in anybody else’s mind that it would be Abdulrazak Gurnah this year, who wins the Nobel Prize,” but then it is an important recognition because the prize has such a powerful global reach that it leads to more translations and more readers, he said at the Sinan Book Club in Shanghai on March 7.
Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, which later became part of Tanzania. He earned his PhD at the University of Kent with studies of African literature and later he became a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the university. He retired in 2017 and is now professor emeritus at the university. Gurnah said he didn’t plan to make a career as a writer from an early age, and recognition didn’t come easy. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
