The British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in the former Sultanate of Zanzibar, present-day Tanzania, and moved to the UK in 1968. He is a novelist, an academic and the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Paradise was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize.
What’s your earliest memory?
Running away from a doctor who waved a syringe at me. I expect he was being playful but I ran for my life, smack into a corner of a flower table. Much blood flowed and I have carried the scar since.
Who are your heroes?
Gary Sobers because he could do anything on the cricket pitch. It’s not easy to have adult heroes, because you cannot forget the fallibility of those you admire, but one candidate could be [the 14th-century Maghrebi explorer] Ibn Battuta because of his curiosity and persistence, spending 30 years travelling across the known world and then writing about it.
What book last changed your thinking?
I read If This a Man by Primo Levi from beginning to end, without moving, one afternoon. It opened my mind to the experience of the extermination camp as nothing had done before.
What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?
Literature in English from Africa, the Caribbean and India. It’s what I’ve been doing most of my adult life: teaching it, reading it and writing about it. I could possibly take on modern African history as well.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Andalusia in its heyday, before the Spanish Reconquista, which reclaimed the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule.
What political figure do you look up to?
Nelson Mandela, because of his courage and fortitude, and his patience and canniness, and for his human failings.
What TV show could you not live without?
I think I could live without TV.
Who would paint your portrait?
I can’t think why anyone would want to bother. I like the gruesome likenesses my grandchildren produce now and then, on birthday cards and such occasions.
What’s your theme tune?
If I have to choose one it would be “Petite Fleur” by Sidney Bechet.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I have ever received was to work hard. And yes, I’ve followed it.
What’s currently bugging you?
The self-regard of the powerful and the smugness with which they contemplate the injustices inflicted on the weak.
What single thing would make your life better?
For the West Indies cricket team to win the next ten Test matches on the trot.
When were you happiest?
When I was a graduate student writing my PhD at the University of Kent, because it seemed that the road ahead was beginning to become clear. I did not know what a long road it was going to be.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I’m not interested in another job, nor in another life. This one is exhausting enough.
Are we all doomed?
Not all, but we are working on it.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Theft” is published by Bloomsbury on 18 March. Abdulrazak will be at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 22 March. Tickets are available from cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out