On Tuesday 25 November 2025, Luxembourg’s Institut Pierre Werner (IPW) announced that on Friday 28 November 2025 Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2021, will take part in its Das Blaue Sofa (The Blue Sofa) literature forum.
The event will take place at neimënster in Luxembourg-Grund and will be hosted by Nathalie Jacoby, English graduate and Director of the Luxembourg Literary Archive (CNL).
At the invitation of the IPW, the author from Zanzibar will present his first new novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in 2021: Theft. In this work, the storyteller recounts a period of great upheaval and explores what can emerge when three young people from different worlds take their lives into their own hands.
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. He has published eleven novels to date, including the Booker Prize-nominated Paradise (1994); By the Sea(2001) nominated for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Desertion (2006) nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and Afterlives (2020) nominated for the Walter Scott Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.
Gurnah is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury. His works are published in German by Penguin Verlag.
Tickets cost €10 (Adults); €5 (under 26); €1.50 (Kulturpass) and can be purchased at https://www.ipw.lu/de/events/abdulrazak-gurnah-theft-diebstahl/774.
