In coversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah
The HinduOn October 7, 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah got a call from the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy 15 minutes before the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature was made. But his novels keep transcribing the distance between one home and the other, filled as they are with yearning for a place where one can feel free, even if one necessarily isn’t. In your Nobel lecture, you spoke of how you began writing in your schooldays — “I wrote because I was instructed to write, and because I found such pleasure in the exercise.” Over the decades, as your relationship with writing changed, what has it done to the pleasure and innocence of the act? The part of Zanzibar I grew up in had a large population of Indians — Hindus, Ismailis, Ithna’asharis, Bohras. This mixing wasn’t odd or exceptional — there were marriages sometimes, but not very often because of religious and other considerations that communities used to closed themselves in.
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