Poured Over: Abdulrazak Gurnah on Afterlives

By Miwa Messer / September 15, 2022 at 6:00 am

“Well, home is a complicated concept….So you’ve shaken me awake at three o’clock in the morning. Where’s home? I’ll say Zanzibar without hesitation. Oh, but then on the other hand, I’ve been living here and working here for 50 years, my family, my children, and my grandchildren live here. The idea that this is not my home, it’s just ridiculous. I just won’t have it. You know, this is my home. So home is complicated, both are home, but it means something different.” An epic story of life, loss, and love against an unforgiving landscape of colonial violence, Afterlives is a multi-generational novel set in East Africa that is at once wistful, grounded—and unforgettable. 2021 Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah joins us on the show to discuss his body of work, the legacy of colonialism, what it was like to win the Nobel and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Feature Books (Episode):

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)

Home by Toni Morrison
Dear Life by Alice Munro

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Fridays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript of this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over, and we have the 2021 Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah with us today. And I am so excited and I’m going to try not to fangirl too hard because Afterlives is one of the most beautiful books I have read in recent memory. And I think everyone’s pretty clear I read a lot, even outside of the show I read a lot. So Abdulrazak, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. We’re very excited to have you here.

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Can we start with Afterlives? I have a million questions for you, and I’m going to try and not pelt you with every single one of them. But Afterlives feels like a much more elegant, luminous, and a little bit– wistful is a word that I saw applied to this book. And I have to say you cover 50 years in the story of a country and a family and a community. And it’s really beautiful, this book. But it also feels like there’s a little bit less of an edge than there is in your previous books. And I’m wondering when you started working on Afterlives?

Okay, well, I don’t know whether to address the edge or whether to address the question, which is when I started working. I started working on it is easy, because I started working on it in 2018. But in a way, I was thinking about it for a long time. I wrote, published another book Paradise in 1994. So let me begin by telling you about that, because there’s a connection. I had thinking about writing something about the war, that episode, that historical episode 1948 war in other parts of the world, because I’ve been hearing about it as I was growing up, because people were still speaking about the Germans and their ferocity, even though by this time they had become amiss. But there was very little to read that I could find, partly because I didn’t really know where to look. I came to know about that later, as I got to know how to research better. But at the time, in 1984, this was when I started thinking about writing that. So then at that point, I wrote a paragraph about the recruiting drive. And I had to put that away and do other things. Right? Live, work, etc. And it was many years before various circumstances allowed me to return to that. But by this time, I was interested in how it is that person who joins the colonial army to fight against God knows what, you didn’t know, how he would have got to that point. How did people get to that point where they would join colonial armies to fight against people like themselves. So then I wrote that, in other words, I wrote the backstory to that. And then life goes on, I wrote other books and whatever, whatever, whatever. But I was still thinking about that, that that historical episode, that war, and the events that happened in that war. And I think after a good 20 or so years, I think I’d acquired enough information and knowledge by then to be able to return to that moment, and to right up to those. So, the two are connected in that way.

It was delightful to realize that you were still turning these ideas around that this is clearly something that you’ve been walking around with and thinking about, because colonialism, I mean, there are people in the world right now who think colonialism is something that you know, happened, and it’s done. And the Empire has become, you know, pieces, and we’re still living with that legacy. I mean, you left Tanzania in 1968 for Britain, if I remember correctly?

‘67.

And you weren’t immediately thinking about being a writer, but you were homesick enough to start making notes and start writing sketches. And then things expanded. And your first novel was Memory of Departure, and that was ‘87. So 20 years after you arrive in the UK.

Yeah, yeah. It took a long time to get that book written properly. I don’t know how many revisions. And then to actually find an agent to publish it. Nothing unique. A lot of writers have this experience.

There’s a lot of love in Afterlives. There’s a lot of love between characters. There’s a lot of love for the community. There’s a lot of people sitting on porches and talking and it’s really wonderful and warm and generous in a different way from the earlier books.

Maybe it’s just getting old. When I say getting old, I don’t mean it’s just, you know, kind of getting old and idiotic, but maybe also learning kind of the way things are complex. And time where kindness is necessary or is appropriate, understanding a little more about the, you know, the struggles people have, and so on. But in any case, if you’re thinking about Memory of Departure is the edgy one. Clearly, yes, indeed, that was not only my first novel, but it was a novel, which, during the writing of which, despite several revisions and toning down, cooling down, in which I was very angry about what I was writing about. That is reflecting all the things that that we do to ourselves, I mean, we meaning people from my part of the world, the various revisions were really kind of tone it down, tone it down, tone it down. But that’s a totally different experience. I think, also, from a writing point of view, I think, probably a lot of writers who keep on writing as opposed to writing two or three or one is that you know, you write that thing that’s closest to you, first of all, and in fact, sometimes you probably otherwise, later on regret that you’ve got to splurge this all out in the first novel. But in a way, that’s it. So you say the things that are closest to you that about you most are making us angry, and well, as time passes, of course, the two vectors are more to learn more, not so young. So it’s more of that process than, you know, a kind of disavowing that edginess, as you call it, that also had its time and its place. And it’s all its integrity, I suppose. But later you learn other things, and you speak as well as truthfully as you can. As it comes to you later.

In time, though, it became clear that something deeply unsettling was taking place, a newer, simpler history was being constructed, transforming and even obliterating what had happened, restructuring it to suit the verities of the moment. This new and simpler history was not only the inevitable work of the victors, who are always at liberty to construct a narrative of their choice. But it also suited commentators and scholars and even writers who had no real interest in us. And it feels like you’re talking about the bridge that fiction allows us between the recorded history, certainly the recorded history of colonialism in the German and British legacy in Tanzania. But also, now, you’re saying, I get to reclaim this, I get to take this out of the sort of the formal history and put a real humanity to this. I mean, the characters in Afterlives are really vibrant, and wonderful, and complicated, and sometimes a little prickly. Can we talk about using your characters, though, and letting them take the story where it’s going to take because obviously, you’re not writing a history of Tanzania, you’re not writing a history of colonialism. But there is a deep legacy for all of this. And in some cases, it’s very traumatic. I mean, I’m also thinking of things like colonialism and this sort of emphasis on cleanliness and order and status and all of those sorts of civilized things that colonialism brings with it, which that’s all debatable, but putting faces to your characters and giving them big beating hearts.

I think what I was referring to it that Nobel lecture that you mentioned, was a slightly more complicated idea than simply challenging the colonial discourse, a colonial narrative. Obviously, that had to be challenged, obviously, because it was self-flattering and untrue. So, you know, that’s straightforward. It had to be challenged, the more complicated thing, and that’s, I think what I was referring to that it was became clear to me that there is something here that has to be resisted, was partly the post-colonial narrative, but seem to have just simply taken over the colonial narrative, in describing its opponents, as well, rather, it’s not appropriate, I should say, its contestants as opponents, and in terms of, you know, kind of colonial histories. I’m talking about the coast of East Africa, and the way that coastal people who, for generations have been mixing themselves up with other people. These are all now foreigners. And this is part of the narrative. This is taking over the narrative, and now acting as the new, authoritarian, racist. So there was that. And then there was also a way in which so much of the chosen academic discourse about Africa, not coming from this kind of situated political position, but really coming from another political position. This is progressive discourse sense. We’ve got to support this, we’re going to see this, we’re going to see that, and they too, it seemed to me, we’re embracing a new form of a colonial narrative that simply sees oppressor and oppressed. It’s really resisting that and saying there’s something much more complicated, actually, in the way people live than simply these big stories in which one is always right. And the other is always wrong.

That’s a huge part of Afterlives, we have one character, Ilyas, who, when we meet him has come to town because he’s been given a job. And he’s very excited to have it. But he’s also been raised by a German farmer. And he intends sort of early in the book to fight on behalf of the Germans against the British. Because he believes in Germany, and he believes in Germany’s right to Tanzania. It’s not a story we often hear when we’re seeing any kind of literature, especially the literature of Africa, but I mean, you don’t often. He becomes, he’s fighting on behalf of the colonial powers against his own people.

But there’s so many Africans did. In fact, the colonial armies, the armies that fought in East Africa and Cameron, and even in North Africa, were Africans, as we would call them now, at the time, they wouldn’t have called themselves Africans. And I think that’s the I think that’s what makes made it possible. That there wasn’t there was not an idea of being an African in the way that we have. So people would have seen themselves as whatever affiliation, whatever ethnic affiliation, whatever tribe, clan people they belong to. And so even if we’re the neighbor, the neighbor may very well have been an antagonist for ages. But in any case, a lot of the colonial forces deliberately, many administrations, deliberately brought people from somewhere else, even though it’s another part of Africa. So the Senegalese taken to Algeria to fight against North Africans. The Sudanese brought to West Africa to what then becomes Tanzania to fight these Africans. So you’re not fighting on people. It’s only later that we when we begin to assess on an African identity that we’ve seen, so completely absurd and ironic that Africans are killing Africans to decide who the boss will be the master will be the colonial bully.

And a lot of those borders that we see on the map today, though, were drawn by colonial powers,

Absolutely. In Berlin in 1885.

Yeah, and to look at the map now and to see lines that were just not drawn by people who live in the place itself.

The reason they drew those lines, of course, was for their own convenience. It’s not a totally logical…from their own logic. So very often rivers form borders, or mountains form borders or something, or suspicion that there might be something rich and wherever, under the ground that gold or something like that. So there was a logic, but it was a logic that was only to do with colonial convenience. And one of the consequences we were talking about Iran, about colonialism, there’s no and one of the consequences. So much of the chaos in so many parts of the formerly colonized world, not just Africa, that Middle East is another example. So much of the chaos is a result of these arbitrary borders of convenience.

Was Hamza, the first character that came to you for Afterlives, or were you working on the on the larger sort of idea first, because there are moments where I feel like he really has the soul of this story because so much happens for him in the course of his to youth into adulthood into marriage and fatherhood, and he seems to have the widest swing of a story arc. And I’m just wondering, did you build Afterlives around him? Because I’m just I’m listening to what you’re saying about the experience of fighting in places that aren’t home being taken away, and sort of being slotted into colonialism. It seems like Hamza really is the soul of this book.

So certainly that was where I started. That’s where I started. And in fact, the very first thing I wrote that became this novel, Afterlives was what is now the beginning of Part Three, which is Hamza returning to the town, and the boat approaching the harbor, and that was the very first morning of starting this book, I wrote that those three, four paragraphs there. But since I also had a desire from the beginning, to bring Afiya into the story. So what was going to happen in my way of thinking originally, was that Hamza would appear in this town, this wounded man, traumatized man, somehow I hadn’t quite determined how, but he will somehow meet up with us here with a woman whose name doesn’t matter but with someone he would grow fond of. And she too, is wounded in some other way that he doesn’t know about yet. Like, we don’t know how Hamza is wounded that we would not have known in the original thinking. So there’s two wounded people come together, and they tell each other their stories. This was how I was conceiving of it to begin with. And so then we learn the stories, then I said, No, I won’t do it like that, I will start and actually take them through the events so that by the time Hamza and Afiya meet, we already know their stories, but they don’t. So that’s why then instead of being the beginning, it became the middle of the book. Because then we have to bring Afiya up to the present. And we have to bring him up to the present as well.

I have to say, I got very excited when I realized when they were going to meet, and how it was going to happen. And I was really hoping that you were going to give them I don’t want to say a happy ending, but a good ending. And, and I was delighted to see how their story played out. And I also appreciate though, we start in 1907, essentially, and move into roughly the early 60s, it feels like I mean, there’s a mention of 63, being a couple of years after independence kind of thing. And you’re covering a lot of time. But in some cases, I mean, the Great Depression becomes a single line, in a chapter hinting at the fact that, you know, a merchant has once again, found himself in dire straits, and yet, and you keep moving through so did you know that you were going to cover this much ground once you started rewriting and reworking everything? Or was that sort of the intent from the beginning was, I’m gonna sit down and give you 50 years, because that’s the only way to give context to these people in this time.

I think pretty quickly, pretty soon I was clear it was going to take us all the way through to independence. I think I knew it was going to be like that, partially because once I got the story of Ilyas my mind, and aftermath of the story of Ilyas, once that was there, then I also knew that that story could not come out until much later, you wouldn’t have been possible to know the outcome till much later. And it is as I describe it, in Afterlives. It is also the case that was after independence, the British would not have allowed that kind of movement to Germany to investigate this, to investigate that. But after independence, what was in the Federal Republic of Germany which was called West Germany became very friendly with what Nika that point. And often, I remember this offer of scholarships to people to go to Germany. And I thought, right, okay, that’s how he’s going to find out. He’s going to go there, and he’s going to get the opportunity to make some research and so on. So in a way it suited everything that we get to independence, a new world opens up. People can now think back to that. Past that history is as history now is no longer a living– well, in a way it is, but it’s also past. Yeah, so I think I had that idea of the span of the years.

You left Tanzania in ‘67, you end up in the UK, how did you end up in the UK instead of say, Germany?

20:05

Well, because we were a British colony. And I spoke a little bit of English, I didn’t speak any German. And actually another reason was, I didn’t particularly want to go to the UK, it was my desire to try to continue studying. I couldn’t find anywhere that was cheap enough nearby that would have taken us which sounds rather ironic. But the only way because I didn’t know people in the, in these different places, it would have had to be a boarding school of some kind. And that was far too expensive. And it just so happened that I had a cousin who was very close to us, more like a brother, really, who was finishing his PhD at the University of London. So now these things go. So I wrote to him, and I said, Listen, I’m going to try and get away from here. Can I come? And he said, Yes, come. So I came. That’s also why I ended up in Canterbury, because he was doing his PhD in agriculture at the University of London, and the Agriculture Department was, of course, not in London, but in the country in the province as well. And it was just over here in your country. So it’s how I ended up in Canterbury.

Where’s home?

Well, home is a complicated concept. I’m sure you know. And a lot of people know, I find when this issue comes up in, you know, the various events and conversations I have with people. But always people come to say afterwards. ‘That’s, that’s how I feel. That’s exactly right. You know, I feel that.’ So you’ve shake me awake at three o’clock in the morning. Where’s home? I’ll say Zanzibar without hesitation. Oh, but then on the other hand, I’ve been working. I’ve been living here and working here for 50 years, my family, my children, and my grandchildren live here. The idea that this is not my home, it’s just ridiculous. I just won’t have it. You know, this is my home. So home is complicated, both are home, but it means something different. And this is what I mean, when I see when I meet people who I meet, a great deal of them who had this feeling. What is it? ‘You know, I’m from Guatemala, that I’ve been living here in England, and I feel this is my home now. But also with my husband, etc. or my parents and my grandparents.’ You know, we’re all capable of having multiple places or affiliation. Without it being that one has to deny one.

Without a doubt. Isn’t home really on the page for you too, though? If I look at your body of work, and I look at where you sit in each of these novels, it seems to me, and Admiring Silence is sort of coming front of mind because you never give your narrator a name. It’s a really sort of poppy modern story that sits, it sort of sits aside for me, certainly in the context of Afterlives, but I really liked the voice. Really, really liked the voice and Admiring Silence, and it sort of sits in the middle of your books, right? Do I have that pub date right? Yeah.

it was number five I think, so exactly the middle actually, because this is 10 novels.

But at that point, you hadn’t been going back regularly. You started going back in ‘84.

Because that’s when I could. But I went back in ’84 and I went back I think in ‘86. Then I went back in ‘89 and I went back. I went back fairly regularly every three years after that. So when I wrote Admiring Silence in 1995 I think, so I’d been back and forth a few times. But the reason the narrator is not named is because the narrator is himself. He doesn’t name himself. He just says what he has to say.

I just really like his voice. It really does stand out for me in a way that I see the connection between the very, very early books Memory of Departure and Paradise and Afterlives, but Admiring Silence. I would like to know more about that guy. I don’t know, I realize you’re probably done with that particular character in that particular book, but at the same time, I’m wondering where he is now.

There is a connection with another novel. But this one is not narrated by that figure. But nor is it really the same figure, but you know, the stories that he discovers in Admiring Silence. The story that he discovers and that is that he’s been ducking and weaving from is the story of his real father as opposed to the stepfather who he assumed is his father and that the real father who left abandoned. So actually, The Last Gift follows him, follows the runaway.

Okay, now I have to move that higher up in the you need to reread this immediately pile, but displacement and parenthood and isolation and loss. It’s not just based on the war, certainly in Afterlives. I mean, there are other pieces, when we first meet Afiya she’s living in terrible circumstances because her parents have died, and there’s no one to take care of her. And she doesn’t even know that her brother exists. I mean, this is something that occurs in all of your novels, this this sort of loss of childhood. I mean, and childhood can be a very sort of modern invention. That’s, once again, that’s a whole nother conversation. But these characters, so many of them, Yusef I mean, he’s 12. When, you know, we meet Ilyas when he’s what 11ish. Or he’s telling his story when he’s 11ish, saying I I was kidnapped, and I was taken away and all of this. And it’s that very fragile age, that adolescence, where you’re grabbing your characters, and they’re sort of that’s the moment where we see that they’re about to have a really difficult go of things.

Being interested, and I suppose, integral, as you said, several of my books, that is, I guess, I’ve been interested in the way children become somehow part of processes, mercantile processes, or processes of exchange between adults, processes of gaining authority and power of others. And women, those that are in many societies, that, certainly in these societies, in a certain historical periods, maybe not always the same extent now, perhaps, depending on location, so how women and children become part of processes of exchange between men, to gain authority to get power and to obey, and so on. But I don’t think this is new, I think I mean, you just have to read Dickens to see the way children are constantly being handed around without any volition on their part. But I also actually, I should say that I’ve also written about old men, like The Last Gift is about an old man who’s dying, sort of by the sea, etc. So it isn’t kind of an obsession about children. But I do think that it is a way of investigating ideas about power. And then also children grow up so you can follow them and see how they are able to retrieve something from the traumatic experiences like in the case of these two in Afterlives. So the beauty for me of something about human character is precisely that. That people are capable of retrieving something after trauma, that there is this capacity, given space, given room, given support. So in the case of Afiya and Hamza, they support each other and out of that, and Khalifa, of course, it plays a crucial role, that something can still be saved too and that will be complete again. Or as complete as possible in other circumstances.

Can we talk about your literary influences for a second? I know you just mentioned Dickens. You’ve also edited a compendium on Salman Rushdie in his work. Who else sort of helped make you, the writer that you are, and certainly the reader?

Hundreds and hundreds of others as well, you know, like you were saying earlier, I’ve been reading on my whole life, even before I knew what I was reading, and then the other influences perhaps, that are not about reading, but about growing up in a certain way of listening to stories of a certain kind. I think actually stories that we hear as children are not given enough consequences when people talk about influences, and I think for me, certainly, as you know from reading what I write, stories that were told in grand school, for example, are still with me. And I’m sure this is also true of people, stories told in the Bible classes and whatever. Some of these things, these things stick forever. And I think reading enables a certain kind of objective examination of how people achieve, especially if you’re a literary teacher like me, you know, teaching literature, wherever. So you see and admire and you say, how did you do that? It doesn’t mean that you will then go and do that yourself. But just understanding the ways in which things can be achieved, understanding the process by which a person reads, I think, helps or helped me as a writer to say, How can I produce the kind of response that I want? If I as a reader were to see this? How would I take it? So I think reading experience and reading knowledge and reading various writers and how they do things. Sometimes we read, or I read things, and as I think I find myself, as I’m reading what I’ve written, I think I’m imitating here, I don’t want that. So you know, kind of tone that down to the rest of it doesn’t sound too as close as all that to whoever. I don’t know if I would call any of these influences, exactly. As influence suggest a certain debt or something like that? I’m indebted in a general way to what I read. But I would like to think that out of this comes something you’re own. So how’s that for an evasive answer?

I think it’s perfect. It’s not an easy question to answer. But at the same time, I’m always sort of fascinated, because I think we all pull from different influences, and no matter where they come from, and some, you know, we think about quite a lot. And some we sort of say, hm.

And also your interest and your admiration also changes, you know, so there’s writers that I would have, you know, been raving about when I was 25. I don’t think, I’ve got them still on my bookshelves. But every now and again, I sort of open and start reading. It’s not true of every writer, there many writers, I would tend to, but suddenly you move on.

I think there are definitely some writers that I read it exactly the right moment, sort of 18, 20, 22, in there kind of thing. And then went back to them later. And they’re just some writers you hit at exactly the right moment when you read them. And you don’t necessarily need to go back, and then others do really amazing things with language. And can we just talk to you for a second about your creative process in general. It seems to me that you’re very clear that you’re working on a sentence level, the way the story flows, and the way not just the characters interact, but also what happens. And, I mean, there were so many lines, I actually, I’m gonna just show you this, I destroy galleys. I just I destroy them completely as I read. And there are so many moments and so many lines are like, Oh, that’s exactly the world in a sentence. And I really, I love that. So can we just talk about craft for a second.

I think I usually have an idea of where I’m going. I have a rough idea to begin with. A thought, this is what I want to write about, then takes a while. It may be when I was teaching it, maybe it might take a couple of years of just sort of thinking things through and writing things down immediately something else. So that idea grows fairly firm by the time I begin. I don’t begin writing until I feel I know a destination. I don’t do plots, because I don’t write like that. It’s not that kind of work. But I do do notes to myself as I’m writing. And I do organize what I’m writing. So it’s not sort of in that respect sentence by sentence. But it is possibly episode by episode, and I do like to work in concentrated phases of several weeks rather than, you know, stretch it out and do 10 minutes every day or 15 whatever. So I find that when I’m in it, I’m in it, and I stay in it for a good while. It could be of course, you’re interrupted for various reasons, life goes on, you know, that kind of thing. So you might have to leaves it alone for a couple of weeks. So my working day will be like this, that I would work on the previous day’s writing, probably for most of the morning. And I will probably start writing something new, maybe either late in the morning or in the afternoon, I always try and stop when I know what the next thing is going to be. So that when I return the next day, I don’t just sit there scratching my head. I know I will go through yesterday’s work to make sure I’m happy, as happy as possible for the time being, and then I can move on into what I had already anticipated from the previous day’s work. So in this way, there is a kind of momentum. That means I can work in a concentrated way for long periods without getting stuck, without feeling ‘Now what?’ Well, of course, that happens sometimes Oh, you think ‘Oh, gosh, that was rubbish. I’m going to start again. Let’s go back.’ So I feel I work intensely. I’m sure most writers do. But I think I don’t start writing until I feel relatively well prepared.

Do you have a favorite moment from afterlives?

Oh, yeah, I suppose I do. I do like that opening, that return, that harbor thing. And often, in the last few months if you’ve said to me, ‘can you read something’, I find myself going to that passage there. Because I think it stands alone. The trouble is reading from a novel, it seems to me that either you read from the beginnings, which obviously is where everyone is going to begin, right? When you pick up the book. Or you have to find a moment which can stand alone like that. Otherwise, you have to explain to say, at this point, this has happened that has happened bla bla bla bla bla. So yeah, but I do like that sort of atmosphere that that passage can use.

What’s next? For you?

I was working on something when the when the Swedish Academy kindly did this. I was actually in the middle of working on something. But to be perfectly, I haven’t actually had a chance to even look at what I was doing. So for the moment, I’m just going along with this. Enjoying what I can of it and when things settle down, if that happens to now be able to return to what I was doing, if he’s still alive may not be alive.

You’ll see when you go back to it. I’d heard you had mentioned this, too. When the Academy called you you thought it was a prank, that someone you knew was teasing you and saying that you had won a Nobel Prize. And you were just saying no, this what? Is that true?

Well, listen, if you have to pick up the phone, and somebody said to you, ‘you have just been awarded a Nobel Prize’, what is your first thought, ‘who’s this? What what who are you?’ Well, that was my answer.

I’m in no danger of having someone calling and say ‘you’ve won a Nobel Prize’.

But you can imagine that you know, what usually happens? What happens every year? It’s you know, is that journalists draw up their shortlist, oh, yes, this year is going to be so and so. It’s absolutely certain it’s going to be a woman, etc, etc, this kind of thing. And I never figured in those lists. So it wasn’t even vaguest, furthest back of my mind that this was happening. And when the phone rings and somebody says that, its like what? Surely you must be joking.

No, I understand. I just I occasionally I’m good at predicting a Pulitzer or National Book Award. And occasionally I’ve gotten things right on the shortlist for the Booker. But I have never once been right about a Nobel Laureate. It’s tricky to sort of even when I see those lists come out from you know, betting agencies and whatnot, I look at it and I don’t have anything to contribute, I have no idea where this is going to go. And sometimes it’s wonderful and it’s Morrison or it’s Ishiguro or it’s you, and it’s delightful.

But also, I think there is something, self-righteous and self-justifying by the way journalists do this, but not only do they do the list beforehand, which perhaps might provoke a kind of anticipation in the writers that they name, who then quite undeservedly, probably feel disappointed that they haven’t been picked. And it isn’t always reasonable who it is that they put on that list? Sometimes you look at the names on that list, and go huh? I wouldn’t have thought. And then afterwards, it’s that sense of, Oh, dear. They didn’t pick so and so.

It’s nice to be asked to dance though, and it’s very nice that you have a Nobel.

That’s very nice indeed. Yeah, I know. It’s wonderful.

So then I’m just going to thank you for being on the show and let folks know that afterlives is out.

It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over and Afterlives is out now.