1 week Ago By [email protected] (Trish Lee)
Abdulrazak Gurnah and Samantha Harvey at the Oxford Literary Festival 29 March – 6 April By Jon Lewis Prize Winners One of the highlights of the Oxford Literary Festival was the talk by the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Abdulrazak Gurnah about Theft, his first novel that won the award. Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar, East Africa and fled to Britain as a refugee after a revolution. His homeland still inspires his work.
Theft follows the paths of three young people, Karim, Fauzia and Badar, one of whom is accused of theft, as they make their way in the world. Gurnah wanted to explore how these youngsters made their decisions and organised their lives with others. Gurnah became fascinated by the Tamarind Hotel, once a home owned by wealthy Indians who were forced out after the revolution.
Properties became state-owned, and then were sold off cheaply, a different form of theft. Badar works in a hotel within Zanzibar’s flourishing tourism industry. Samantha Harvey, winner of last year’s Booker Prize for her short novel Orbital, in an interview with Ben Lawrence from the Daily Telegraph, who are sponsoring the Oxford Literary Festival, admitted that she did not know anything about space before she started on the project.
She was inspired to write about astronauts onboard the orbiting international space station having become fascinated by images of the earth taken from the ISS. Her motivation was: “can I put into words what I see and feel when I see those images?”. Harvey went on to research the project by visiting the NASA website, reading books by astronauts, and even the ISS maintenance manual.
The only detailed knowledge she needed from NASA itself was learning of the orbital paths on specific days since the novel takes place over one day. Harvey became fascinated with ordinary, everyday facts such as the physical and psychological effects of gravity on the astronauts – “misshapen faces as if under a spell”, She wanted to explore the dissonances between trapped in a very small dwelling and the infinite vastness of space beyond the station, and being alone and isolated in space but confined intensely in company where astronauts cannot find any solitude. Two inspirational writers in top form.
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