Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948—) was born in Tanzania in what was then called the Sultanate of Zanzibar. His father was a businessman who had immigrated from Yemen. At the time, the Arab elite ruled Zanzibar, but when that class was overthrown in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, Gurnah and his family fled as refugees to England. (The same uprising brought the family of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, to England, as well.)

In England, Gurnah began to write to express and reflect on his feelings of homesickness and isolation, and to process the experiences of poverty and witnessing violence and chaos that gripped his homeland. Gradually, he realized that he could refuse the narrative of colonizers and victors about the land, people, and cultures they dominated. His writing started to refute the commentators in dominant culture who “were viewing us through a frame that agreed with their view of the world, and who required a familiar narrative of racial emancipation and progress” (Abdulrazak Gurnah Nobel Prize lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023). Gurnah seeks to give a voice to the people and experiences overwritten by the forces of colonization and oppression by sharing “the stories people lived by and through which they understood themselves.