KULTURA / CULTURE
Autor je brojnih kratkih priča i eseja, kao i 10 romana He is the author of numerous short stories and essays, as well as 10 novels
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Every life is worth remembering Abdulrazak Gurnah has spent more than three decades writing, with quiet and unfaltering conviction, about those who’ve been suppressed and cast aside in the forgotten corners of history A bdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948. When his country went through a revolution in 1964, citizens of Arab or- igin were persecuted and Gurnah was forced to flee. He was just 18. It was three years later, while living as a refugee in England, that he began writing, and he chose to do so in English, de- spite Swahili being his first language. His first novel, Memory of Departure, was published in 1987. Next came the works Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005), all of which were shortlisted for the most prestigious literary awards. He recent- ly retired from his position as professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent.
The author of numerous short stories and essays, as well as his 10 novels, he has dedicated his literary career to exploring the ways human beings react in exile. His novels are set in the intimate spaces creat- ed by families, companions and friendships: in those spaces where love and duty are nurtured. In book af- ter book, he has led us through shocking moments in history and destructive cracks in society, careful- ly sketching what it is that keeps those spaces intact, writes British daily The Guardian. Each of Gurnah’s novels focuses on people whose stories have not entered the archives or which lack the documents required to make them unforgettable. But those shop owners, housewives, local soldiers, stu- dents and refugees are important to him and he uses his books to make them profound and complex, re- minding us that every life is worth remembering. In re- cent years, as a series of humanitarian crises has com- pelled desperate people to risk their lives in the quest for a better future, Gurnah's work has gained greater resonance and significance. He wrote in a 2001 essay for The Guardian: “The debate over asylum is twinned with a paranoid narrative of race, disguised and smug- gled in as euphemisms about foreign lands and cultur- al integrity”. And his novels actually insist on strip- ping this paranoid narrative of its power. However, Gurnah doesn’t yell or call for argument, but rather offers a constant, relentless, unfaltering voice that soon becomes the only audible sound.
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