We are at that time again. The debate over asylum is twinned with a paranoid narrative of race, disguised and smuggled in as euphemisms about foreign… - Abdulrazak Gurnah

Now, Britain has seen those despised people become fellow citizens and has learnt tolerance and discrimination in public dealings with them. In this respect, it is a more generous society than the one I first met 30 years ago.

(How important is diversity in literature?) I suppose, in order to understand how other people live and what it is that motivates and energises and makes them happy and unhappy you have to know about other people. It’s really quite as simple as that. You have to know. And the best way to know about other people is to hear what they have to say and not to be ventriliquising other people’s lives and trying to explain people away. So in this respect writing from other places, or at least from other perspectives, which might be cultural, social, gender, is one of the most direct ways in which you can hear what other people are saying.

I don’t see writing as purely fun. I do think that there is something necessary about it. This is what I talked about in my Nobel Prize lecture. There are certain imperatives that came up as I began to think about things. And that’s how I started to write. But continuing to write is because you are faced every day with things that are also necessary to be talked about, to be inquired into. And I think for me, this is the drive. It’s to speak about what I see and to do so in a way that both helps me to understand better what it is that I see and also to disseminate, to tell others about it, if they happen to be interested. I think writing is an important way of extending and understanding our vision to others which is not to say that this is something particularly perceptive or particularly informative. It could be just what we already know. Sometimes we read things and we share in the reflections of others, of the person who’s writing, and perhaps there is some illumination in it that helps us understand, but sometimes it’s just that it endorses things that we have ourselves understood, but not perhaps trusted. So there are various, very complex things happening both in the process of writing but also in the process of the reader engaging with the writing – and I speak as both a reader of course, as well as a writer. That is the pleasure and the fun of the writing process. That you’re not just writing, talking to yourself, but you’re talking to imaginary readers, although for me the imaginary reader is not very specific. You’re not just confiding something to your journal. I know that I will be speaking to people about this and therefore I speak about events in the world. It may be in the form of a story, but a story can be a vehicle for addressing issues as well as addressing injustices as well as indeed just addressing pain and love.