[Gurnah's] sentences are deceptively soft, but the cumulative force for me felt like a sledgehammer. He has written work that is absolutely unflinching and yet at the same time completely compassionate and full of heart for people of East Africa. He is writing stories that are often quiet stories of people who aren't heard, but there's an insistence there that we listen.

Maaza Mengiste, author of THE SHADOW KING, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth.

The Times

[A] captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and departure … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide.

Guardian

Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain.

Spectator