When Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2021, Wole Soyinka, who won the prize in 1986, declared that ‘the Nobel had returned home’. The author of ten powerful novels, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Abdulrazak Gurnah has always used narratives steeped in memory to explore the things we find unspeakable.

As an outspoken interrogator of complacent postcolonial perspectives, Gurnah has always known that fiction can offer a compelling access point into the vast narratives of global history. In the lives of his newest characters, Ilyas, Hamza, and Afiya, bound together by love and torn apart by war, Abdulrazak sees the world, and asks the reader to acknowledge perspectives that are almost always elided. In the personal, he interrogates the political as Afterlives asks what an unimaginable future can hold, unfolding in the wake of an unspeakable past. He discusses his work with fellow writer Christine Dwyer Hickey.

'A brilliant and important book for our times, by a wondrous writer' Philippe Sands (on Afterlives)

Compelled to Remember: Abdulrazak Gurnah