2021 Nobel Prize winner is visiting China

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is visiting China for the first time. Winning the Nobel Prize has made no difference in his life as "it was not in my mind, not in anybody else's mind that it would be Abdulrazak Gurnah this year, who wins the Nobel Prize," but then it is an important recognition because the prize has such a powerful global reach that it leads to more translations and more readers, he said at the Sinan Book Club in Shanghai on March 7. Shanghai Translation Publishing House, a publisher dedicated to the translation and publication of outstanding literature all over the world in China, acquired copyrights to all the 10 novels by Gurnah as soon as the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced in 2021, and had them published in two phases, in 2022 and 2023 respectively, according to Huang Yuning, deputy editor-in-chief of STPH. Shanghai-based writer Sun Ganlu commented on the Chinese version of Gurnah's novels "Admiring Silence" and "Paradise", saying that he was amazed how well Gurnah's clear and accurate narrative of very complex situations had been successfully translated into Chinese, a much different language that is rich with nuances and relies heavily on the context.