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Nobel Prize winner to be feted at 2023 conference
Prof Abdurazak Gurnah
What you need to know:
- Prof Gurnah, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, will be the special guest of honour.
The Pan African Writers Association (Pawa) in collaboration with the Uganda Women Writers’ Association commonly known as Femrite and Makerere University Literature Department has launched a call for the international literature conference to honour the life and works of Nobel Prize laureate, Prof Abdurazak Gurnah.
The conference that will be held from March 23 to 25, 2023, at Makerere University in Kampala is expected to host about 300 guest, the cream of African writers and other literary dignitaries, from within and outside Africa.
Prof Gurnah, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, will be the special guest of honour.
The event will have keynote lectures, paper presentations, panel discussions, book launches and exhibitions and other cultural activities. Writers, scholars and literary activists have been invited to submit papers.
Prof Gurnah, the fifth black writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, joins previous torch bearers of African descent, lighting the future of African literature on the world stage.
He was born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and later relocated to the United Kingdom in the 1960s during the Zanzibar revolution.
The citation for his Nobel award stated that it was “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
His story of dislocation at a young age is a story of many African young people, a story of then and a story of today.
Prof Gurnah is a novelist and an academic, emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.
Some of his notable works include: Paradise (1994), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the Sea (2001) longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
He is the author of many short stories, essays and 10 novels. While his first language is Swahili, he has used English as his literary language.
However, his use of bits of Swahili, Arabic and German in most of his writings and his approach to cultural issues in his works places him at the centre of cultural activism.
He says he has to push back against publishers who continue the practice of italicising words or putting them in a glossary simply because the words are in another language.
As academic Hamid Dabashi notes, Prof Gurnah “is integral to the manner in which Asian and African migratory and diasporic experiences have enriched and altered English language and literature.”
The conference will be held under the main theme: “Celebrating the Life and Works of Abdulrazak Gurnah for the future of African Literature.”
The sub-themes are; Abdulrazak Gurnah’s life in perspective; the works of Abdulrazak Gurnah; migration and African literature; literature in African languages; African literature and publishing; the Nobel Prize and African literature; Literature and modern technology; literature and cultural technology; indigenous languages in African literature; the role of translation in African literature; literature and climate change; literature, peace building and security; and love, romance and betrayal in Abdulrazak works.
The deadline for submission of all abstracts is December 30, 2022, while the deadline for submission of full papers is February 28, 2023.
Final papers will be published by Pawa in conference proceedings and other strategic co-publishers.
