Reverberations

Abdulrazak Gurnah' s latest work thematically follows on from the author' s most successful novel Paradise and once again takes readers to East Africa. It reminds us of how closely connected European and African history are and how they intersected with the individual destinies of East Africans.

 When Ilyas was still a boy, he was stolen from his parents on the coast of East Africa by German colonial soldiers. He spent many years away from home, experienced suffering, but also learned to read and write, which was definitely not common at the time. Upon returning home, Ilyás discovers that his parents have died and his sister Afija lives with a strange family, where she experiences contempt and beatings.

 Several years later, Hamza also returns from the war, scarred in body and soul, with nothing but the clothes on his back - until he meets the beautiful, fearless Afiya. They fall in love and live happily together for a while, but great changes are taking place in the distant world and they begin to affect those around them. Afiya and Hamza must adapt to the new conditions and prepare their son for them, with whom the whole story ends.

 Abdulrazak Gurnah, only the second Nobel Prize winner from sub-Saharan Africa, represents a long-unheard voice that speaks to readers around the world and has only in recent years finally reached the Czech audience. Echoes is a novel set in a specific intellectual and cultural environment, but at the same time it reflects universal human experiences such as suffering, loss of home and loved one, love and forgiveness.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, which was then under British administration. At the age of twenty, he left for Great Britain during the Zanzibar Revolution, where he later received a doctorate from the University of Kent in Canterbury - where he also later worked as a professor of English and post-colonial literature. In addition, he devoted himself to creative writing. He made his novel debut in the late 1980s with Memory of Departure (1987), but it was not until his 1994 novel Paradise (SPACE 2023), nominated for the Man Booker and Whitbread Prizes, that he became famous.

 In his works, he focuses primarily on post-colonial themes from Africa, the Caribbean, and India, describing feelings of uprootedness, the clash of cultures, and the colonial past. His native language is Swahili, but he writes his works in English. In 2021, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for his treatment of the topic of colonialism and its impacts. The novel Reverberations was nominated for the Walter Scott Award and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.