![]() Gurnah says his love of writing goes back to his schooldays, but he never intended to turn it into a career. He went to check online, imagining that whoever the prankster was would soon be “roaring their heads off and saying, ‘hey, you fell for it!’” Like many people answering that initial phone call, at first he didn’t believe it. Yet it was only with the Nobel Prize award that he shot to literary stardom. © UNHCR/Hannah Maule-ffinch Previous Next Along the way, he penned novels such as Paradise, By The Sea, The Last Gift and Pilgrims Way, exploring themes of dislocation, isolation, colonialism and identity. Nevertheless, he excelled as a student before turning to academia, eventually becoming professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, a post from which he retired in 2017. He recalls that adapting to life in Britain was hard, his sense of dislocation heightened by the racism – casual, overt and sometimes physical – that was common at the time. Gurnah speaks and writes from experience. ![]() Today, he looks back on a distinguished academic career and a string of highly acclaimed novels, culminating last year in the Nobel Prize for Literature – awarded for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. “That was for me the biggest reason for wanting to leave. Yet he only resolved to leave after the new regime closed the schools. People lost their livelihoods, businesses were expropriated, and so forth.” “A number of people were killed, people were in prison, various people were expelled. “It was a period of terror – not necessarily personal terror, but the atmosphere was terrifying,” he says. ![]() ![]() Seated in his “writer’s attic” – a book-filled room at the top of his house in a village just outside the historic city of Canterbury, southeast England – Gurnah told UNHCR his own story of displacement and dislocation, starting with how and why he left his native Zanzibar in 1968.įour years after a revolution in which the Sultan and his government were overthrown, violence on the island was still widespread. Especially for a poor stranger – and especially if you’re 18 years old.” “But really it was so different, so far away in terms of culture, social proprieties, language, religion … It was a difficult and shocking introduction. Send us feedback about these examples.“You think you understand places,” says author and Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, reflecting on the challenges he encountered as a teenager from Zanzibar arriving in the UK more than half a century ago. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tremulous.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2022 With it, O’Farrell demonstrates fiction’s ability to offer counter narratives to those of received history, to open before us imaginative abundance and a tremulous sense of possibility. 2022 Consider the household of Jack Chambers (Styles) and his wife, Alice (Pugh), who is fair of face and tremulous of mind. 2022 Tim’s shuddering vulnerability entwines with the tremulous, petulant voice Yang has chosen for Theresa, and the two characters set up a terrible vibrating resonance inside the same body. 2022 Light, as a tremulous Stepford wife watching her world unravel with each glass of wine, does an enormous amount of acting with very few lines, and McTeer plays her imperious critic with casual, note-perfect hauteur. Natalia Abbakumova, Washington Post, 20 Nov. 2022 On the videos, wives recite lists of grievances in tremulous voices, like frightened villagers petitioning the czar in the days of the Russian Empire. Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times, 26 Sep. 2021 Dominik seems to have directed De Armas to lead with her tremulous vulnerability, to drift through the movie in blurred states of fragility, anxiety and panic. 2014 The show, which is based on the romance novels by Julia Quinn and produced by Shonda Rhimes, seduces with its tremulous sighs, feigned swoons, and montages of scenes between the sheets. Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 26 Apr. Recent Examples on the Web From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead - whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver all day long - comes now and then the soft melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away. ![]()
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