Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL is a Tanzanian-born novelist and academic who lives in the United Kingdom and holds British citizenship. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise, which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion; and By the Sea, which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.