"(does Gurnah think the British know enough in general about the history of their influence around the world?) “No,” he says, baldly. “They know about some places that they want to know about. India, for example. There’s this sort of love affair going on, at least with the India of the empire. I don’t think they’re so interested in other less glamorous histories. I think if there’s a little bit of nastiness involved, they don’t really want to know about that very much.” “It’s because they don’t get told about these things. So you have on the one hand scholarship, which deeply investigates and understands all of these dimensions of influence, the consequences, the atrocities. On the other hand, you have a popular discourse that is very selective about what it will remember.”"
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Nobel laureates in LiteratureAcademics from the United KingdomNobel laureates from the United KingdomNovelists from TanzaniaEssayists from Tanzania
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Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers'
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