Laya Soleymanzadeh
PhD, English Literature, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel laureate of 2021, was born in Zanzibar, on a small island off the coast of East Africa. The Nobel Prize committee awarded this year’s literature prize to Gurnah, ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’. Gurnah has been a Writers Make Worlds featured writer for a number of years and we are delighted to be able to mark this fantastic and well-deserved award. It is great to see this prize go to an author who has with his deft and immersive skills consistently drawn attention to issues of colonialism, migration, and the refugee situation, as the Nobel citation notes.

In his novels, Gurnah’s immigrant and refugee characters try to negotiate hostilities around hospitality in spaces such as immigration offices and, in the long run, in their relationships with the host culture. His work opens up spaces for readers – what we might refer to as ‘hospitable listeners’ – to apprehend the current refugee crisis, especially in Europe. Gurnah’s works call for a rethinking of the dominant knowledge about the migrants and refugees. He shows us characters in inhospitable spaces in Europe and East Africa trying to rediscover, reimagine, and reconstruct their identities.

The Nobel laureate has been heralded in the media as the first black African writer to win the prize in over three decades, drawing attention to his lesser-known status compared to other Black and Asian writers living in Britain and writing in English. This also reverberates through his response to The Guardian: ‘I became relatively content with the readers that I had, but of course I can do with more’. However, the questions remain: has the media coverage been truly hospitable to Gurnah’s narratives? Will the Nobel Prize win now provoke interest in the plights of refugees, so that they are treated with less hostility than the author depicts in his fiction? As he says: ‘Overt, self-assured racism has for the most part diminished, […] but one thing that has barely shifted is our response to migration. Progress on that front is largely illusory’.   

The Nobel award to Gurnah is timely in so many ways, including personally. I write as someone who has recently finished a PhD project on Gurnah’s fiction and its representation of migrants, refugees and ‘inhospitable spaces’. His Nobel win announcement exactly one day after my graduation was indeed a rush of joy.

Photo: Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, 2009, PalFest (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

Cite this: Soleymanzadeh, Laya. “Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-gurnah-2021-nobel-prize. Accessed 15 April 2026.

The post Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature appeared first on writers make worlds.

Chelsea Haith

The analysis is of the following paragraph from Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (The New Press, 2001), pp. 192–193.

Latif Mahmud sat leaning back, his gaunt face tight in a grimace of fortitude, his lips pressed together and widened into the beginning of a grotesque smile. He did not know, I suppose, whether to snarl at me for my story of his father’s inadequacy or to smile like a worldly man who could not fail to find our domestic squabbles paltry, and could not find my efforts to exculpate myself anything but contemptible. The room was now in the lingering dusk of an English summer evening, a light which at first made me anxious and irresolute but which I was learning to tolerate. I was learning to resist drawing the curtains and flooding the room with light, just so as to expel the gloom of that slow leaden onset of night. I thought I should rise and make some more tea, put the light on in the kitchen, break the grip of the silence in which we had been sitting then for a few minutes. But as soon as I stirred, Latif Mahmud uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. I waited for him to speak, but he said nothing, and after a moment he sighed and leaned back again, I rose carefully, so that I should not stumble in my weariness and let him think me feeble, and went to the kitchen. I put the light on and avoided glancing at the cadaverous shadow of a man reflected in the window-panes, avoided the hard-edged sourness which lingered on that face all the time, which lingered there like a deep failing that subterfuge could not disguise. I drew the curtains with my face turned away, and then stood staring into the sink, trembling uncontrollably, feeble after all, overcome by memories which never seem to dim, overcome with pity for myself and for so many others who had been too feeble after all to resist the puniness and raggedness of our souls. So many deaths, and then so many more deaths and mutilations to come, memories I have no power to resist and which come and go to a pattern I cannot anticipate. I don’t know how long I stood there, perhaps a moment too long. Perhaps I made a noise. In any case I heard Latif Mahmud stir in the other room, and stirred myself to fill the kettle and rinse the cups for our tea. I heard him appear in the kitchen, felt him in that small space, and when I turned to him I saw that his eyes were large and luminous, glistening with hurt. He looked straight at me and I dropped my eyes, afraid of what he was now going to say, weary of the bitter recriminations that had worn down my life.

Saleh Omar, a Zanzibari refugee living in an unnamed British village ‘by the sea’, is the unreliable narrator of this section whose dealings with a Persian trader years ago in Zanzibar have led to an enmity with Latif Mahmud, now a respected poet and lecturer at the University of London. In this chapter they meet again for the first time in years. Ironically, Saleh has used Latif’s father’s name as his own in his application for asylum in England. Saleh narrates and explains the circumstances of their falling-out over Saleh’s possession of Latif’s family home, which Saleh came by due to the transference of a debt Latif’s father owed to the dishonest trader, Hussein.

The interconnection of the two men’s lives is central to the novel’s plot, and this moment is the tipping point in which Saleh waits for Latif’s judgment on him and his story. The entangled nature of memory and history, misunderstanding, and shame are crucial thematic concerns throughout the novel and are best captured in this moment of uncertainty. Saleh, now an elderly man, stands trembling at the sink in his small English kitchen, ‘overcome by memories which never seem to dim, overcome with pity for myself and for so many others who had been too feeble after all to resist the puniness and raggedness of our souls’ (193). Here Gurnah is not preoccupied with colonialism or empire, but rather with capturing Saleh’s somewhat melodramatic musings on the inadequacies of the human spirit.

Broadly commenting on writing by Muslims living in or writing about England, Claire Chambers notes that ‘A key feature of the body of what may be controversially termed “Muslim writing” in Britain is that writers are often not overly concerned with (neo)-colonialism and “the West”, but rather with establishing connections and filiations which go beyond this’ (2015, 220). By the Sea is no exception. True to Gurnah’s rejection of reductionist notions of migrancy, Muslims and East Africa, By the Sea deals far more with the mistakenly-produced enmity between the two men than it does with Saleh’s precarity as an asylum-seeker. Though the novel opens with Saleh’s arrival in England as an asylum-seeker and his interactions with his assigned social worker, Rachel, most of the text follows the two men’s conflicting narratives of their lives in Zanzibar and their eventual negotiation of a tenuous friendship based somewhat precariously on ethnicity and their shared history, which is resolved in this section.

Chambers observes that ‘Gurnah frequently wrongfoots the reader, subverting his or her expectations of the narrative’s likely shape’ (2011, 116). This section of the novel brings this unexpected narrative shape into focus, charting Saleh’s musings on the dying light of the unfamiliar English dusk alongside the resolution of a decades-old grudge held by Latif. Saleh feels the urge to illuminate the room following the telling of his story, to expel ‘a light which at first made me anxious and irresolute but which I was learning to tolerate’ (192). He is used to Zanzibari sunsets; the ‘slow leaden onset of night’ (192) in England seems to capture not only his anxiety about being in a foreign place, but the advance of age and infirmity as well. Latif treats the older man with kindness by acknowledging his mistake in blaming Saleh for the loss of his family home, and Saleh is grateful for the ‘respite’ the other man affords him.

If By the Sea is an ‘examination of how history and memory intertwine and interfere with each other’ (Hand, 2010, 77), this section encapsulates the resolution of that interference, while still sustaining the ambiguities of the two men’s positions in one another’s lives, and in English society.

~

Works cited

Claire Chambers. British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Claire Chambers. Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780–1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Abdulrazak Gurnah. ‘Writing and Place.’ Wasafiri 19.42 (2004): 58–60.

Felicity Hand. ‘Untangling Stories and Healing Rifts: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea.’ Research in African Literatures 41.2 (2010): 74–92.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “Close reading of By the Sea.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

The post Close reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s <em>By the Sea</em> by Chelsea Haith appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, 2009, PalFest (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

Dislocation, exile, loss, and identity are central themes in all of Gurnah’s novels, many of which chart Arab African characters’ experiences of relocation in the places to which they have emigrated, or escaped. His characters frequently undergo a process of identity and cultural hybridisation in their transnational relocation from the margins to the metropoles. Some of Gurnah’s novels, such as Pilgrim’s Way (1988), By the Sea (2001), and Gravel Heart (2017), seek to capture the foibles of British culture and politics at various points in history from the perspective of the outsider looking in.

Gurnah is arguably a member of what Claire Chambers calls the ‘more proletarian “myth of return” class’ (2015, 15), a group or class of British Muslim writers who moved to England in the 1970s and 1980s and have not returned to their countries of origin. His sixth novel, By the Sea, deals complexly with notions of ‘home’ and the play of memory in identity-formation.

From his debut novel to his most recent, Gurnah’s writing has demonstrated a commitment to complicating essentialist notions of marginalised and misrepresented Muslim people in England. In ‘Writing and Place’ (2004), Gurnah says that he writes from memory, and notes ‘how vivid and overwhelming that memory was’ (58). He argues that the questions with which he deals are not new, but are ‘firmly inflected by the particular, by imperialism, by dislocation, by the realities of our times. And one of the realities of our times is the displacement of so many strangers into Europe’ (59).

—Chelsea Haith, 2017

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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