Abdulrazak Gurnah is a celebrated novelist, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. The Nobel Prize committee cited his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” for his win. Gurnah’s novels include Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Admiring Silence, By the Sea, Desertion, The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and most recently, Afterlives. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah emigrated to the United Kingdom in the late 1960s. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006, and is on the advisory board of the journal Wasafiri. Gurnah is professor emeritus of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, and lives in Canterbury, England.