Bertelsmann Welcomes Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, was a guest at Bertelsmann Unter den Linden in Berlin 1, where he also met Bertelsmann Chairman & CEO Thomas Rabe. But first, the author from Zanzibar, who is best known for his literary examination of East Africa’s colonial history, discussed his work with ZDF presenter Jana Pareigis and answered questions from the numerous journalists who had come to attend a press event organized by his German publisher, Penguin. The conversation was accompanied by a reading from Gurnah’s 2001 novel “Ferne Gestade” (original title: By The Sea) which Penguin re-released yesterday, by the well-known audiobook narrator Frank Arnold.

Page after page, Gurnah’s books reveal a profound knowledge of human nature, of its perennially tangled and often absurd patterns of behavior in suffering and happiness, in oppression and freedom, in darkness and in beauty,” Penguin publisher Britta Egetemeier said in her welcoming remarks. “Ultimately, the important thing is not where a person comes from or what their story is, but what connects and can connect us.” The event kicked off a reading tour that will take the author to Munich, Cologne, Berlin, and Leipzig this week. In Leipzig, Gurnah will be a guest on the Blue Sofa, the joint authors’ forum of Bertelsmann, ZDF, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and 3sat.

When the Swedish Academy in Stockholm awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to the writer last October, it came as a big surprise to the book world. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s works had long been out of print in most languages, if they had ever been translated at all. Penguin Verlag took advantage of this circumstance and quickly secured the rights for the German-language editions of the best-known works by the author, whom the Nobel Prize jury had honored “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” At the beginning of December 2021, Penguin then published the novel “Das verlorene Paradies” (Paradise), which gave Abdulrazak Gurnah his international breakthrough in 1994. The book has been on the “Spiegel” bestseller list since its publication and has sold nearly 80,000 copies to date. Yesterday, it was followed by the release of “Ferne Gestade” (By The Sea), another important work by the author that tells the intertwined life and escape story of two people from Zanzibar. The novel was originally published in 2001 and was at the time nominated for the Booker Prize, the most important book prize in the Anglo-Saxon world. For this fall, Penguin has announced the release the first-ever German edition of Gurnah’s latest novel, 2020’s “After Lives”