Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been announced as the headliner for 2021 the Ake Arts & Book Festival. The festival organizers announced this view their Twitter handle.

This year’s festival which will be happening in Lagos from October 28-30 is themed “Generational Discordance.” The festival, which has been running since 2012, involves book readings, panel discussions, poetry recitals, film screenings, theatre and music performances.

Previous headliners include Wole Soyinka, Niyi Osundare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, Maryse Condé, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

As the festival headliner, Abdulrazak Gurnah will be on the cover of the Ake Review and also grant an in depth review. He will participate in the Lives and Times Series event.

Gurnah has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He has served as a professor of English at the University of Kent and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He is the author of the following books: Paradise (1994), Desertion (2005), By the Sea (2001), Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Admiring Silence (1996), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), and Afterlives (2020), the short story collection My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa (2006).