Abdulrazak gurnah, an Arab-Tanzanian novelist in Britain, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature after the "unpopular writer" work met Chinese readers in the form of only one or two short stories. After the announcement of the Nobel Prize, the Shanghai Translation Publishing House reacted quickly and obtained the Chinese simplified translation copyright of Gurna's ten works.
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, Gurna came to England as a student in 1968 and wrote in English. Not only a novelist but also a literary researcher, he worked as a professor of English at the University of Kent, retired as an advisory board member of the literary magazine Vasafri, and now lives in Canterbury. In 2021, "for his influence on colonialist literature and his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the situation of refugees in the intercourse between different cultures," Gurna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and received widespread attention.
Shanghai Translation Publishing House acquired the rights to Chinese simplified translations of Gurna's ten works, including memory of departure (1987), pilgrims way (1988), dottie (1990), paradise (paradise 1994), admiring silence (1996), and by the sea.) 2001), Desertion 2005, The Last Gift 2011, Gravel Heart 2017, Afterlives 2020 (tentative title of Chinese). Among them, "Paradise" was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Novel Award, and "Abandoned" was shortlisted for the 2006 Federal Writers Award.
Gulner was very concerned about african colonial history, as well as the experience of Africans in Britain and the topic of identity. Most of his protagonists enter new social environments, resulting in the fragmentation of their original social identity and self-identity. Gurna's first three novels, Memories of Parting (1987), The Pilgrim's Way (1988) and Doti (1990), document the migration experiences of contemporary British immigrants from different perspectives, and Dorty is the only novel by which Gurna has a female protagonist, based on the tragic experience of a woman in London after World War II. Set against the backdrop of the Colonial Period in East Africa during World War I, the fourth novel, Heaven, is quite fantastical and shows the social ecology of the African land.
(Yan Durong media reporter Song Yan)