Abdulrazak Gurnah

Leading up to his novel, Afterlives—which won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature—Abdulrazak Gurnah’s books had been out of print in the United States for several decades. Thus, many modern American readers first encountered Gurnah’s prose through the story of Ilyas, a boy stolen from his home by German colonial troops, and sprawling forward into a multi-generational saga of displacement, resilience, and love. As novelist Imbolo Mbue wrote in the New York Times Book Review,“[Gurnah] is a novelist nonpareil, a master of the art form who understands human failings in conflicts both political and intimate — and how these shortcomings create afflictions from which nations and individuals continue to suffer, needlessly, generation after generation.” Grappling with questions of quote “belonging and unbelonging,” Gurnah joined SAL in 2022 for a philosophical discussion of the long spiral of colonialism as it intersects with art and literature.