Gurnah, Abdulrazak
Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. December 20, 1948, Sultanate of Zanzibar). Tanzanian-born novelist and academic who was based in the United Kingdom. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize; and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on December 20, 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which is now part of present-day Tanzania. He left the island at the age of 18 following the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution, arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee. He is of Arab heritage.
Gurnah initially studied at Christ Church College, Canterbury, whose degrees were at the time awarded by the University of London. He then moved to the University of Kent, where, in 1982, he earned his PhD, with a thesis titled Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction.
Alongside his work in academia, Gurnah is a writer and novelist. He is the author of many short stories, essays and ten novels.
While his first language is Swahili, he has used English as his literary language. However, Gurnah integrates bits of Swahili, Arabic, and German throughout most of his writings. He has said that he had to push back against publishers to continue this practice, while they would have preferred to "italicize or Anglicize Swahili and Arabic references and phrases in his books." Gurnah has criticized the practices in both British and American publishing which want to "make the alien seem alien" by marking 'foreign' terms and phrases with italics or by putting them in a glossary.
In his works, Gurnah draws on the imagery and stories from the Qur'an, as well as from Arabic and Persian poetry, particularly “The Arabian Nights.”
Gurnah began writing out of homesickness during his 20s. He started by writing down thoughts in his diary, which turned into longer reflections about home; and eventually grew into writing fictional stories about other people. This created a habit of using writing as a tool to understand and record his experience of being a refugee, living in another land, and the feeling of being displaced. These initial stories eventually became Gurnah's first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), which he wrote alongside his Ph.D. dissertation. This first book set the stage for his ongoing exploration of the themes of "the lingering trauma of colonialism, war and displacement" throughout his subsequent novels, short stories and critical essays.
Consistent themes run through Gurnah's writing, including exile, displacement, belonging, colonialism, and broken promises on the part of the state. Most of his novels tell stories about people living in the developing world, affected by war or crisis, who may not be able to tell their own stories.
Much of Gurnah's work is set on the coast of East Africa, and all but one of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar. Though Gurnah has not returned to live in Tanzania since he left at 18, he has said that his homeland "always asserts himself in his imagination, even when he deliberately tries to set his stories elsewhere."
Gurnah edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing and has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoe Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has been a contributing editor of Wasafiri magazine since 1987, and he has been a judge for awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Booker Prize, and the RSL Literature Matters Awards.
In 2006, Gurnah was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL). In 2007, he won the RFI (Radio France Internationale) Témoin du Monde ("Witness of the world") award in France for By the Sea.
On October 7, 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". Gurnah was the first Black writer to receive the prize since 1993, and the first African writer since 2007.
Gurnah lives in Canterbury, England, and has British citizenship. He maintains close ties with Tanzania, where he still has family, and where he says he goes when he can: "I am from there. In my mind I live there."
Zaki, Sherif
Sherif Zaki (b. November 24, 1955, Alexandria, Egypt - d. November 21, 2021, Atlanta, Georgia, United States). A pathologist who as America's chief infectious disease detective helped identify the Covid-19, Ebola, West Nile and Zika viruses along with the severe acute respiratory syndrome -- SARS.
Sherif Ramzy Zaki was born on November 24, 1955, in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent his first six years in Chapel Hill, N.C., where his father, Ramzy Zaki, was attending graduate school. He later lived in the Caribbean, the Middle East and Europe, where his father worked for the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. His mother, Dalal (Elba) Zaki, was a teacher.
Zaki graduated second in his class of 800 from the Alexandria Medical School in Egypt in 1978. But he was less interested in practicing medicine than in unraveling mysteries, which had been an obsession of his ever since he was captivated by the novels of the British author Enid Blyton as a child. Zaki's obsession with solving puzzles and resolving mysteries was at the heart of his work at the C.D.C
Zaki earned a master’s in pathology from Alexandria University. But since autopsies were not permitted in Egypt for religious reasons, he did his residency in anatomic pathology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also received a doctorate in experimental pathology.
Zaki then went to work at the C.D.C. and became a naturalized American citizen. Zaki joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1988 and became chief of the agency’s infectious diseases pathology branch in the early 1990s.
Zaki and his team made strides in distinguishing rare diseases and their mutations and determining what made some of them, like SARS and Ebola, so contagious and lethal. To do so they applied a process called immunohistochemistry, which allows researchers to identify foreign pathogens by staining cells and observing them through electron microscopes capable of magnifying bacteria and viruses 740,000 times.
In 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Zaki determined that a number of people who had come into contact with letters containing a white powder had died from anthrax after their skin was exposed to the bacteria, or after inhaling it.
Zaki and his team helped identify a deadly outbreak of hantavirus in the Navajo Nation in 1993. That discovery spurred the expansion of the infectious diseases pathology branch. The expanded branch subsequently discovered a previously unidentified bacterial illness called leptospirosis in Nicaragua; and the mosquito-borne Zika virus in the brain tissue of babies in Brazil, establishing that it could be transmitted during pregnancy.
Zaki headed the agency’s Unexplained Deaths Project, a squad of detectives of last resort responsible for delving into the causes of the 700 or so baffling fatalities from disease that occur in the United States every year.
After four people who received organ transplants in Massachusetts and Rhode Island developed a viral infection and three of them died, Dr. Zaki and his colleagues pinpointed the cause as lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a rare rodent-borne virus. It turned out that the organ donor’s daughter had a pet hamster.
In 2005, a few days after complaining to his pediatrician of a fever, a headache and an itchy scalp, a 10-year-old Mississippi boy became so agitated that he bit a relative. After the boy was hospitalized, tests were inconclusive, but he died two weeks later.
About a week after that, Zaki’s team detected rabies virus in the boy’s body. They learned from follow-up interviews that dead bats had been discovered in the boy’s home, and that he had found a live bat in his bedroom.
Zaki married Nadia Abougad. They had two children, a daughter, Yasmin, and a son, Samy.
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