Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.

About the Lecture:
Literature and the Local: the significance of context, locale and specificity in critical discourse. This seminar series honours Nontando
‘Noni’ Jabavu (1919-2008), South African writer and journalist. An acute observer of life in the Eastern Cape, her major works were the memoirs The Ochre People (1962) and Drawn in Colour (1963). In 1961 she was appointed editor of The New Strand. She was born in the Eastern Cape to a family of prominent intellectuals, her father a founding member of the academic staff at Fort Hare. Educated in England, Jabavu made regular trips back to South Africa. In her work she returned to the question of what it meant to be an African, yet driven by circumstances to live outside of her country.

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