Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian novelist and academic of Yemeni origin. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2021, Gurnah was awarded 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". On 1 September 2024, Gurnah took up the appointment of the Arts Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is also Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.

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