Dr. Abdulrazak Gurnah was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of seven novels which include Paradise (shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes), By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the RFI Temoin du monde prize) and Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize), and most recently Gravel Heart (2017). His main academic interest is in postcolonial writing and in discourses associated with colonialism, especially as they relate to Africa, the Caribbean, India and the Indian Ocean littoral. He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, 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).


Travel narratives have a long specialist history, bringing news to geographers and map-makers, as well as to ambitious rulers with a taste for conquest and plunder. Trade and empire multiplied Europe’s encounters with the world and the need to describe it, which was often simultaneously a self-representation. Travel narratives achieved a new popular dimension in the nineteenth century, the age of global European supremacy, through explorer writing and its offshoots in stories of colonial adventure and later a gothic variation of the mysterious stranger from distant places who brings danger to the metropole. There were multiple variants of these forms, some of which actually challenged imperial rectitude about its cultural and evangelical mission. The latter were exceptions and in the case of Mary Kingsley, exceptional. Dr. Gurnah will focus on two early twentieth century accounts published within a year of each other and written by a sister and a brother, Ethel Younghusband’s Glimpses of East Africa and Zanzibar (1910) and Sir Francis Younghusband’s Kashmir (1909).