Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nobel Prize in Literature 2021: Official interview

Where did your passion for reading and writing come from? I learned to have pleasure in reading simply because of the stories. I love stories. And at first, when you're a child, of course, stories are told to you. And in the way that we grew up, children are, I suppose this is true of all cultures, but children are entirely the responsibility of the women. And we lived in a kind of extended family setup. So when I say the women, I mean more than one, various aunts and whatever. And it was really very nice sometimes to just sit nearby while they're telling each other these stories, or indeed sometimes including us. So it started like that. But then when you learn to read, there are books, not very many at the time. I remember the Aesop's Tales, for example, in translation, of course, in Swahili, being one of the earliest books that I was able to read at school. But that's not the same thing as the reading that comes later. That is more or less sort of reading and rereading the same thing. You know, children, it seems, I know this from my own children, can read the same book 20 times without tiring of it. So I think familiarity is also part of that pleasure of reading. But later on, then, of course, curiosity takes over and reading becomes a very fulfilling exercise because you learn as well as enjoy and so on. Was Aesop's Fables your favourite book as a child? I don't think Aesop's Tales is my favourite. It was, I think, my earliest. But I do remember the pictures because it was, of course, for a child's book, you know, lots of illustrations and that kind of thing. And I do remember that picture of the fox leaping for the grapes has stayed in my mind forever. Do you think books you read as a child can have a big impression on you? Yes, and also just simply some of the stories that you hear. You may not remember always the experience of reading, but some of the stories remain for a long time. And even for a writer, as it were, they become sources of places to go to and find out some more. And you actually find when you reread a story like, I don't know, Qamar Zaman and Princess Badura, that story, which is one of those that I do remember and love, you find that, in fact, when you go to an adult version of that story, it's much, much more complicated than you had understood as a child. And so there are kind of layers in those stories that you read as a child, which then become possible sources of adventure, reading adventure, I mean, later on. Did you want to be a writer when you were young? Writing was not really a career that was possible when I was growing up. I didn't know anybody whose career was a writer, who was a professional writer. So it wasn't something I aspired to do. I might just as well have aspired to be an astronaut or something like that. It just wasn't something you knew anybody to be doing. But I don't think I had a career like, you know, I mean, sometimes you hear children saying, I want to be a train driver, I want to be a, I don't know, computer programmer or something. But I don't think I had anything quite like that. I think I was still, for a long time, still open to what might lie ahead. And I just enjoyed school, and enjoyed learning and enjoyed all of those things. And I was just kind of assumed that I'd be doing this for quite a while. Maybe that's what I wanted to be. How did your upbringing shape you and the writer you've become today? I didn't know what or how my upbringing shaped me while I was going through it. I don't suppose many people do unless they're extremely unhappy at the time or something like that. And I also don't think I would have reflected in it quite so intensely, if it hadn't been for the fact that I was so far away from the place where I grew up. I don't think so. But I think one of the things I had to do in the process of coming to understand, or to come to terms with being a stranger here in Britain, was to think back to things like my upbringing, where I lived, the things we believed. So this is what I mean when I say I'm not sure if I would have thought quite so intensely about it. I think being away actually forces you to examine things in greater detail, perhaps even more critically, not just of the events and so on around you, but also of your own participation in that process of living. So I would say it shaped me very much so. Not in a bad way either, not in a way that is destructive, but in a way that forced reflection. Who or what inspires you to write? What inspires me to write is to be able to speak truthfully about what I see, and the things that concern me. So it's not just my eyes are open and therefore whatever strikes my eye, I want to write about it. But there are these concerns about, well, for example, I'm very interested in the way people can retrieve something from trauma. So I'm thinking not only of asylum seekers or refugees, but also of life, of the way people in life are able to get something out of mischance, out of traumatic events. I've always been interested in the way families work, particularly the way both power and kindness go along together. Of course, most families love each other, but at the same time there are these what seem like kind of power struggles going on within families. So I'm interested in writing about that and the complexity of that, and how indeed out of kindness, a sort of unkindness comes as well, sort of requiring obedience, requiring that you don't shame us by doing this or by doing that. Particularly I'm thinking of the way women are treated in our culture and in many other cultures. So those are the kinds of things that make me want to write, things that, as I say, hit my sense of this needs to be spoken about. I need to say something about it. And of course, also the other thing that makes me want to write is to create something which is beautiful and pleasurable. Why do you think writing is important? I don't see writing as purely fun. I do think that there is something necessary about it. This is what I talked about in my Nobel lecture. There are certain imperatives that came up as I began to think about things, and that's how I started to write. But continuing to write is because you're faced every day with things that are also necessary to be talked about, to be inquired into. I think for me this is a drive. It's to speak about what I see and to do so in a way that both helps me to understand better what it is that I see, and also to disseminate, to tell others about it if they happen to be interested. I think writing is an important way of extending an understanding or a vision to others, which is not to say that this is something particularly perceptive or particularly informative. It could be just what we already know. Sometimes we read things and we share in the reflections of others, of the person who's writing, and perhaps there is some illumination in it that helps us understand, but sometimes it's just that it endorses things that we have ourselves understood but not perhaps trusted. There are various, very complex things that happen both in the process of writing, but I think also in the process of the reader engaging with the writing. I speak as both a reader, of course, as well as a writer. I like that. That is the pleasure and the fun, if you like, of the writing process, that you're not just writing talking to yourself, but you're talking to your imaginary readers as well. Although for me the imaginary reader is not very specific, so I do not have a specific imaginary reader, but you are talking not to yourself. You're not just confiding something to your journal or whatever. You know, or I know, that I will be speaking to people about this, and therefore I speak about events in the world. It may be in the form of a story, but a story can be a vehicle for addressing issues as well as addressing injustices, as well as indeed just addressing pain and love. How important is diversity in literature? I suppose in order to understand how other people live and what it is that motivates and energises and makes them happy and unhappy, you have to know about other people. It's really quite as simple as that. The best way to know about other people is to hear what they have to say, and not to be ventriloquising other people's lives and trying to explain people away. So in this respect, writing from other places as well, or at least from other perspectives, which might be cultural, social, gender or whatever, this is one of the most direct ways in which you can hear what other people are saying. Do you think literature is an important way to hear other people's voices and gain access to other people's cultures? Literature performs different functions, of course. Literature also engages us, because we take pleasure in complicated pleasure. It depends what you read, of course. But I think, at its best, literature does that as well as it brings news, tells you things, or maybe challenges, simplifications that you've lived happily with, makes things more difficult for you in that respect. I see all of those complicated functions. To learn, to enjoy, perhaps also to be challenged, although that depends on the degree to which you are open to challenges. People can be very difficult in resisting challenges. Where do you get your ideas from when you write? The ideas about what to write about just present themselves. You don't have to ache about it. But it seems to me there are things that, for many writers, there are only a limited number of things that really engage a certain kind of writer. That is, the writer who writes more reflectively rather than writing genre writing, which is not to say anything about value here. But I think there are things that probably keep returning, things that are perhaps to do with experience, a particular experience, or anxieties that you still want to understand about or keep talking about. I find that when I've finished one novel, I often think, but I didn't talk about such and such. Although it may not be possible to immediately do that, then it becomes something at the back of the mind, as it were, that when I can, I will return to this, because there is this aspect of something or the other that I haven't done. Maybe I might, maybe I might not. But it's in this way that the ideas turn around and percolate and hang around for a while. It may be something you see, something you read, that provides a happy impulse. Then reading becomes more directed. When an idea begins to emerge like this, then you follow it up by reading some more about it, thinking some more about it, making some notes. It isn't just that an idea comes and you think, I think that I will write about this. It really takes a little bit of a while for it to rumble along before it becomes specific or concrete enough. Is there a particular piece of advice you would give to an aspiring writer? Yes. The best advice you can give a writer is just write. There is no simple way. There is no way in which you can say, if you stand on your head twice a day, that this will enable you to write. You just have to write and keep writing. Don't be discouraged, just keep writing. It could be you're in the wrong business, in which case sooner or later you will discover that. But you won't discover that by queering yourself. You'll only discover that by the actual process of doing the writing. If that doesn't work, you can't persuade anybody at all forever to be interested in it, then it could be that you're in the wrong business. But even then, I wouldn't give up. I would still keep pressing on. What's your favourite thing about writing? Oh, I don't know. When it's finished. Writing is best when it's complete, when it's finished. The process itself has its pleasures, of course, now and then. At the end of the day's work, when you can get up and say, that's all right, I did okay today. But there are also many days when you get up and you think, what a load of rubbish. I'm going to have to go through all that again tomorrow. But I think the best moment in writing is when you think, yep, I think it's done. Who is your favourite author? I don't have favourite authors. Or rather, I do have favourite authors, rather than, say, an author that I can name. These vary a little bit. If I look back 10 years ago, I don't know who I would have said the writers of. Maybe one or two are still with me. But you move on. Recently, the things I've enjoyed reading are the writers from Africa like Mazamangiste, Yvonne Adiambo-Wall. These are people who are doing brilliantly well, I think. In both of those cases, those writers that I mentioned, they've just published their second novel, so they're very early in their writing careers anyway. But also I admire writers like Jane Coetzee, Nooruddin Farah, Michael Ondaatje. I can name several in this way. So it isn't a matter of favourite. I'm open to all these brilliant writers, and I read as many of them as time and chance. Chance in the sense of you don't always hear about writers. Or you hear about them and you don't have time to read all of them. But there are many favourites. What do you enjoy doing outside of writing? Watching cricket. I enjoy watching cricket. I enjoy gardening. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy reading, listening to music. You see, just an ordinary kind of thing that everybody does. How has life changed for you after being awarded the Nobel Prize? The award of the prize was a great honour, of course, and I'm very proud of that honour. Because it is such a global event, it also means that a lot of people want to know about me, want to know me, want to speak to me. Also, as a result of the prize, many publishers in many different languages who hadn't published any of my work before are now doing so. They also want their journalists to tell their readers about me. So basically, I've been talking to a lot of people since the award of the prize, and that really has taken up quite a lot of my time since then. So what has changed since the award of the prize? It's difficult to assess exactly, because I'm just talking all the time to people, explaining things. What I do know is that it hasn't really been possible to do any writing during this time. But that's fine, because I know for sure that it will be like this for a while, but then at some point it will be possible to return and write again.