BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the writer Abdul Razak Gurnah.
A Zanzibari-born British author, he's a Booker Prize nominee,
Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent and,
as of 2021, a Nobel Prize winner.
He was born in 1948 and left Zanzibar when he was still a teenager.
Leaving behind the upheaval that gripped his home country after the 1964 revolution,
he arrived in the UK with few connections.
As he began to build a new life in a strange country whilst facing a prolonged period of poverty and alienation,
he started writing as a way of untangling his own story.
Identity, memory and the migrant experience are recurring themes in his work,
which includes the novels Paradise and By the Sea.
His heroes are often of the unsung variety.
hospital orderlies, canteen workers, housewives.
But by unearthing the intricate histories that lie just under the surface of their apparently small lives,