Abdulrazak Gurnah and Kamila Shamsie

Thursday 16 December 2021, 7 p.m. · 56 minutes

This year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah was at the shop to read from and talk about his work. Born in what was then the Sultanate of Zanzibar and is now part of Tanzania, Gurnah came to Britain as a refugee in the 1960s, becoming professor emeritus of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent. The author of ten novels as well as short stories and many essays of literary criticism, Gurnah was praised by the Nobel committee for his ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’.

Gurnah was in conversation with author Kamila Shamsie.