31.08.2026 • 28 Min.

“National narratives tell you what you must not say.” In this episode, Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah joins HEIST founding editor Peter Matthews. Gurnah challenges history from a European perspective. To him, the idea of European centers is not just an oversight, but a kind of blindness. His work, novels with interwoven histories based on complex and surprising historical narratives, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. The Swedish Academy cited his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee."