Lithouse Podcast

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African-born writer to receive the award in close to 20 years. The Swedish Academy awarded Gurnah the prize «for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents».Across the world, more and more readers are discovering Gurnah’s body of work. His novels Paradise, Afterlives and Desertion explore the history of East Africa and Zanzibar, while other works, such as Admiring Silence and By the Sea, portray a migrant’s encounter with British society. What they all have in common are the memorable characters created by Gurnah, characters that are not heroes, but rather unique in their quiet everydayness, and who often feel alienated from the world around them.Through these characters, Gurnah gives us masterful depictions of a region and its history, of the colonial era, of exile and migration