How to find more Abdulrazak Gurnahs

None of you have probably heard of, let alone read, Abdulrazak Gurnah before he won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. The works of this Tanzanian Zanzibari novelist - Tanzania being a country and Zanzibar being an autonomous part of it, the same way, say, Varsha Adalja is an Indian Gujarati writer - will be more readily available now, not just because he's won a Nobel, but also because the 72-year-old writer, who has lived in Britain since the 1960s and writes in English, will be pushed by his publishers worldwide. And that is very welcome indeed.

Varsha Adalja's Gujarati readers are unlikely to have heard of, never mind read, popular and critically acclaimed Bengali novelist Swapnamoy Chakraborty or Tamil writer Nanjil Nadan. This is partly because of the language barrier. But even if English or other Indian language translations of their works exist, literary readers face the stumbling block of 'Akademisation' - the turn-off factor of finding writers to be obscure even before they're read because they are Akademi-approved, not heartily pushed for their works per se. So Indian literary readers are liable to read 2018 Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk from her original Polish rather than, say, Odiya writer Santanu Kumar Acharya. We need more desi 'Nobels', non-Akademic awards from private entities to discover our Abdulrazak Gurnahs.