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Dr Ida Hadjivayanis, Senior Lecturer in Swahili studies from the African Languages, Cultures and Literatures Section of SOAS, has worked on the official Swahili translation of Nobel Prize Literature Winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new book.

Titled ‘Theft’, Gurnah’s novel is a coming-of-age story that follows the lives of three East African teenagers as they navigate Stone Town, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam in 1990s Tanzania. The book received high praise from critics, selected as the book to look out for in 2025 by outlets such as The Guardian, Observer and Irish Times.

I get so many ‘oh yes’ instances where domestic items, ways of speaking and descriptions meant for a global audience simply need one word in Swahili.

Abdulrazak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, and has been a frequent collaborator with the academic efforts of SOAS for many years, having had previous involvement in lectures with the Centre for African studies in 2013.

Speaking on her involvement in producing the Swahili translation of the novel, Dr Hadjivayanis said: 

“Translating Abdulrazak Gurnah is such a joy for me. It is an exercise in bringing his writing home to the Swahili speaking regions. I get so many ‘oh yes’ instances where domestic items, ways of speaking and descriptions meant for a global audience simply need one word in Swahili – the real word for the items or phrases. 

“I have had the opportunity of spending some time with Abdulrazak and as he described the characters in Zanzibar, I could replay my memory of him walking in Stone Town and pointing out at landmarks. I understood deeply why some narratives were included in the novel, the struggles, the powerlessness, the injustices, but also the oral narratives that he mentioned while he was in Zanzibar. The characters in the novel are only slightly older than me. This means that the world that they live in is very real to me.

“It is a contemporary world that Swahili literature has not seen in international literature. I hope this book gets adapted into the Swahili studies school curriculum.”

The African Languages, Cultures and Literatures department at SOAS houses the largest cohort of scholars that are dedicated to the study African languages and other forms of cultural expression in sub-Saharan Africa. Research in the Africa section also focuses on the languages and cultures of Africa through the lenses of literature, philosophy and linguistics.