Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 10 Novels Acquired by Chinese Publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House secured the Chinese rights to the Nobel laureate’s fiction oeuvre. Five novels will be released in 2022.
Abdulrazak Gurnah's books. Credit: LA Times.

Abdulrazak Gurnah's books. Credit: LA Times.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 10 Novels Acquired by Chinese Publisher

The 2021 Nobel laureate in literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, will have his novels translated into Chinese for the first time. After the Swedish Academy’s unforeseen choice of the Zanzibar-born Tanzanian novelist, a huge amount of people picked interest in his fiction, praised for its “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

The Chinese rights to Gurnah’s ten novels were acquired by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, translator Bruce Humes first informed Open Country Mag.

“We aim to publish five of Gurnah’s full-length novels within the second half of 2022,” said Feng Tao, the head editor at the publishing house.

“Especially in the last decade, we have gradually evolved from publishing one or two masterpieces of important writers to marketing their writing as a whole,” Feng added. “Classic and important authors are presented in the form of anthologies or series of works.”

Abdulrazak Gurnah by Frank Augstein/AP.
Abdulrazak Gurnah by Frank Augstein/AP.

Chinese readers were also introduced to the Nobel-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. Feng believes Gurnah’s work will resonate. “Colonialism, post-colonialism, and the conflict and intergration of different races and cultures are among the most internationally relevant themes of our time,” he said.

Gurnah’s Nobel Prize win was trailed by discussions that he isn’t widely known in the Anglophone world. Consequently, publishing houses moved to acquire rights to his novels, both for translation and republication.

Days after the announcement, a New York Times feature reported the rarity of finding Gurnah’s novels, revealing that Gurnah’s management had begun receiving offers from American publishers. Afterlives, which received bids from six publishers, was sold to Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Random House, which plans to release it in August 2022. The deal also included two other novels, By the Sea and Desertion.

...

Emmanuel Esomnofu, Staff Writer at Open Country Mag

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recommendation

The bisexual poet’s historic victory, for his second collection Nomad, is also the first time that a writer of the younger generation has won Africa’s richest prize, worth $100,000.
The debut Nigerian author’s short story collection, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, has seen him compared to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith and praised by Damon Galgut.
With Glory, the Zimbabwean joins Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma and India’s Rohinton Mistry in an elite group.

“An ambitious new magazine that is committed to African literature"

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Get the essential stories in African literature + Nigerian film and TV: in-depth, thought-provoking Profiles, features, reviews, and conversations, as well as news on events and opportunities.

We respect your privacy and will never send you Spam or sell your email.

Search

Top