Abdulrazak Gurnah Susheila Nasta

Since his migration to Britain in 1968, Abdulrazak Gurnah has become known both as an important writer of fiction and as a critic and reviewer of African literature. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah’s arrival coincided with the heyday of Sergeant Pepper and was only months before Enoch Powell was to deliver his now notoriously xenophobic ‘Rivers of Blood’ speeches. From the publication of his first novel in 1987, Gurnah explored the theme of the migrant’s displacement, asking what happens ‘to people who are in every respect part of a place, but who neither feel part of a place, nor are regarded as being part of a place’. In his early novels – Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrim’s Way (1988) and Dottie (1990) – the focus was primarily on questions of the unhomeliness of place as well as the political and social changes which have caused such huge demographic shifts in the late twentieth-century world. Paradise, his fourth novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and is set in East Africa in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War. It presents the reader with a number of different and competing stories which not only interro- gate standard European versions of history but also complicate the strategic nationalisms of some earlier fictions by African writers.