Theft: The many faces of injustice

The Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has appeared on the longlist for the 2026 Gregor von Rezzori Prize, announced on 12 March, for his novel Theft (2025), which was published in Italian as Furto. The novel has also appeared on several international lists of notable books released last year, compiled by major literary platforms and newspapers.

Gurnah, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, spoke about the novel with visible emotion in a short video. He described Theft as a story about injustice and about how people learn to confront it. The idea came to him while visiting a small hotel in Zanzibar, a place that captured his imagination and eventually became the setting for much of the narrative.

The novel follows three marginalised characters whose lives unfold together from early youth into adulthood, as they try to shape lives that feel meaningful. At its centre lies the injustice of a false accusation of theft, an event that opens onto deeper questions of identity and individual struggle. These themes unfold within the maritime world of Zanzibar, a setting historically exposed to successive waves of human movement and political change. In that shifting environment, questions of belonging and identity emerge from multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives.

In an interview with The New York Times, Gurnah once remarked that he arranges the books in his library by grouping together the works of each author. The habit reflects a particular way of thinking, he tends to view every writer’s body of work as “one book in many volumes.” The same idea can be applied to his own fiction. Across his novels one encounters recurring themes like dislocation, identity, forms of orphanhood both literal and social, and the quiet struggles individuals undertake in order to survive.

Theft begins with the story of Badr, a boy working as a servant in a household in Dar es Salaam during the 1990s. He is accused of secretly adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and reselling them for profit. No evidence ever proves his guilt. His employers, Haji and Raya, who generally treat him kindly, suspect the shopkeeper may have deceived them. Yet Uncle Osman, the owner of the house, insists on Badr’s dismissal. Othman has long resented the boy because of tensions with Badr’s father in an earlier period. At this point, Karim, Raya’s son from a previous marriage, intervenes. He helps Badr leave the city by arranging a room for him in Zanzibar and securing him work at a small hotel there.

From that moment the narrative widens, moving between personal drama and the broader social atmosphere of Zanzibar in the decades following the Zanzibar Revolution and the union with Tanganyika that created the modern state of Tanzania. Gurnah traces the intertwined lives of Karim, Fauzia, and Badr while echoing motifs familiar from his earlier work, particularly the experience of childhood vulnerability, where in novels such as Paradise, young protagonists must navigate worlds shaped by debt, absence, and loss. Similar tensions reappear in Theft.

Karim grows into a gifted student and eventually receives a scholarship to study in Dar es Salaam. He later obtains a government position and marries Fauzia, who had once been an equally promising student and had hoped to become a teacher. Badr’s path is harsher. After being abandoned by his adoptive family he spends his adolescence working in Haji and Raya’s home. The accusation of theft further limits his prospects until Karim helps him secure employment in the Zanzibar hotel.

At the same time Karim and Fauzia’s marriage begins to deteriorate after an English volunteer enters their lives. A quiet closeness gradually develops between Fauzia and Badr, while Karim ultimately decides to leave Zanzibar for Europe. The novel incorporates references to specific historical moments, including the politics of Zanzibar’s ruling parties and the sending of comrades to Cuba for military training. Near its conclusion, the narrative briefly gestures toward global events such as the Srebrenica massacre.

The novel inevitably intersects with Gurnah’s own biography. As a teenager he witnessed the upheaval that followed the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar, which overthrew the Arab Omani ruling elite. The violence that accompanied those events forced many families, including his own, to leave the island.

The origins of the story are closely tied to the building that inspired it. Gurnah has explained that he first began imagining the novel while looking at a structure once known as the Masri Hotel. The building had originally served as temporary accommodation for visitors to the island, including military personnel and technical advisers.

During the years of the Cold War, it hosted Soviet and Chinese experts as well as specialists from other countries working with Zanzibar’s government. In later decades, it also welcomed consultants from wealthy states who arrived to advise the authorities. Their governments paid generous salaries and provided luxury vehicles, sometimes more for symbolic generosity than for practical necessity. For a long period, the building stood empty before a consortium eventually restored it in cooperation with local business figures and transformed it into an international hotel where the rich are served.

The novel inevitably intersects with Gurnah’s own biography. As a teenager he witnessed the upheaval that followed the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar, which overthrew the Arab Omani ruling elite. The violence that accompanied those events forced many families, including his own, to leave the island. Gurnah eventually settled in the United Kingdom. In a widely quoted interview, after receiving the Nobel Prize, he said that the central impulse behind his writing “has always been the experience of losing one’s place in the world.” That reflection resonates with the layered history of Zanzibar itself, an island shaped by successive imperial powers including Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom, and Oman.

Within its intimate family drama, Theft also reflects on the ambitions that once animated the revolutionary period. The ruling Afro-Shirazi Party had promised equality for all inhabitants of the island and sought to dismantle structures of exploitation and colonial hierarchy. Its programme included improving education and public health while raising the general standard of living. The party also advocated African unity, an idea that culminated in the union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere.

In later interviews Gurnah suggested that Theft explores several forms of “stealing.” Among them is colonialism itself, which can be seen as the most consequential theft in Zanzibar’s history. The idea resonates strongly with the Nobel committee’s citation when it honoured him in 2021 for his exploration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents. In Gurnah’s fiction, the sea frequently functions as the element that both separates and connects those worlds.

In a sense, Gurnah’s fictional world resembles that childhood atlas. Across twelve novels he has attempted to map encounters between distant places and intertwined histories, using a language that is both restrained and quietly luminous.

One detail from his childhood illuminates this imaginative geography. Gurnah has recalled that one of the gifts that fascinated him most was a colourful atlas he received when he was twelve. The large illustrated volume contained stories about different peoples and ways of life across the globe. Its influence seems to have remained with him ever since.

Among the books he has mentioned reading recently is a study of the Andean condor, the enormous bird native to South America whose wingspan can reach nearly three and a half metres and whose presence carries deep cultural meaning across the Andes.

In a sense, Gurnah’s fictional world resembles that childhood atlas. Across twelve novels he has attempted to map encounters between distant places and intertwined histories, using a language that is both restrained and quietly luminous. It is therefore striking that Theft now appears on the same Italian prize longlist alongside Egyptian writer Iman Mersal for her book In Traces of Enayet. The coincidence brings together two works of African literature translated into Italian during the 2025–2026 literary season.

The parallels extend in unexpected directions. The Masri Hotel that inspired Gurnah’s novel once belonged to Omani owners before the revolution. The last sultan of Zanzibar, Jamshid bin Abdullah, had received part of his education at Victoria College in Alexandria. Egypt itself played an important role in regional politics during the Cold War and supported the independence of Zanzibar as well as its later union with Tanganyika. Earlier historical accounts, such as the study Zanzibar: Its History and Its People by William H. Ingrams, traced Egyptian influences on the island back to ancient times.

Yet the most compelling connection between the two contemporary books lies in their treatment of marginal lives and fractured identities. The characters of Theft struggle with injustice and displacement in ways that echo the figure of Enayat in Mersal’s narrative, a young woman who died by suicide and whose life seems to have been pushed to the edges of official memory.

Mersal’s book ends with a small scene in an airport waiting hall where a young girl lifts her eyeglasses as if they were an airplane and flies them playfully above the chairs. When her mother asks why she refuses to wear them while sleeping, the child replies that she does not want them to block her dreams. Gurnah’s novel closes with a similarly quiet moment. Hauwa drives the group to the beach at Mangapwani. While she plays by the water with Nasra, the daughter of Fauzia and Karim, Fauzia and Badr walk silently along the shore beneath the palm trees. Without speaking, Fauzia takes his hand. They pause for a moment before returning. Seeing them approach, Hauwa raises her eyebrows toward the sky and smiles. A gesture suggesting that even after many defeats, life continues to move forward with quiet resilience.