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When author and academic Abdulrazak Gurnah first visited India, he travelled to Mumbai (then Bombay), and was struck by how closely the city’s architecture resembled that of his hometown, Zanzibar (in present-day Tanzania). “Which is not surprising, because many of the builders and contractors in Zanzibar were Indian,” he tells a packed audience that has braved the afternoon heat on Kozhikode beach at the Kerala Literature Festival. On the occasion, a Malayalam translation (titled Apaharanam) of Gurnah’s 2025 novel, Theft, was also released.
The 77-year-old author of 11 novels and several short stories and essays, speaks fondly of a childhood that lent him an early exposure to multiculturalism and co-existence, themes that recur throughout his work. Widely regarded as one of the foremost voices in contemporary postcolonial literature, Gurnah, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, reflects on the motivations and ideas that shape his writing, in this interview.
Edited excerpts:
Q: You started writing in your 20s, after you left Zanzibar and went to the U.K. Half a century later, are your motivations the same? What has changed?
A: Well, what has changed is that I didn’t really know what I was writing when I started, like anybody else. And there is, or there was for me, a kind of urgency to address certain issues, which I suppose having done that, now there is a different kind of desire behind the writing. And also, you gain experience, you gain confidence, so things change for that reason.
Q: In your latest book, Theft, there is a lot of pain and betrayal, yet you write empathetically. Is that how you view life too — more empathy, less judgment?
A: I think, in general, we as human societies are capable of accommodating quibbles and eccentricities and so on amongst those we live with. And we probably are empathetic towards each other, generally. It’s only when people are at a distance that they become more judgmental, I think. But with those we are intimate with, in a community or in a family, I think we are on the whole quite forgiving. So it’s that kind of sense.
Q: After your Literature Nobel win in 2021, your books are now being translated in Africa. Has the Prize changed your readership?
A: Yes, of course, it has changed because there are so many more translations, people are curious and interested to know something of the work of this person. And that’s what prizes do, they make you visible in a way that you weren’t before. And of course, the Nobel Prize has a global impact, so, there are many translations and wonderful reader response, so I’m very happy.
Q: In the Booker-nominated novel, Paradise (1994), why did you decide to tell the story — of Africa on the brink of colonisation — through a child protagonist?
A: Partly because the child is naive, he does not fully understand what’s going on, either in the local situation or indeed in the big world, especially at that time when [in the book] people didn’t have access to radio, TV or the Internet. I wanted that naivety to be a part of how the experience unfolds. You as a reader are much better informed than Yusuf (the protagonist) is, so you know what’s going on and he doesn’t. So there is an interesting irony which makes for, I think, good reading. You see how he comes to a greater understanding of his situation and indeed what is going on. And at the same time, I hope you as a reader understand it better because you’re also going through that learning experience that he’s going through.
Q: And in your 2020 novel, Afterlives, the story of German colonisation is told through the experiences of ordinary Africans. Does that change our idea of colonialism?
A: Well, I hope so. Because I guess the argument is that the narrative of that encounter, the colonial encounter, more often than not, has been written by the colonisers. It’s not to say that people who were colonised did not have those stories which they were saying to each other.
Take, for example, the conflict in that period which is the subject of Afterlives. It has been written about in a certain way, but from the point of view of the European presence there. Therefore, it’s not a complete story. There are things missing. It’s not necessarily to say what was there before is wrong. Sometimes it is, but it’s not necessarily to say it’s wrong. It’s more to say that it’s only a part of the story.
The writer was at the Kerala Literature Festival 2026 on invitation from DC Books.
English (US) ·