Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of 'Afterlives' - 2021 Nobel Prize winner discusses distractions, why reading is as important as writing, and needing blank walls
Writer's Routine
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After Lives
In an earlier novel, Paradise, the final episode of that novel is actually a recruiting drive for the German colonial army. So I became interested in how this young man would demigabout 18 or so at Padak Poi by the end of the novel. How would he have got to that point? And it ended up being the story of the boy. In fact, the novel begins with the boy first and then continues to that point that I've just described. It's still a reason for wanting to write about it because it's an episode of this. That isn't well known, and it's a good thing always to know, much better than not tea.
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