In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.
What can happen when three young people from different backgrounds take their lives into their own hands? With wisdom, warmth and humor, Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah tells of the lives of young Tanzanian cosmopolitans today.
On November 28, 2025, Abdulrazak Gurnah will present his new novel “Theft” on the Blue Sofa in Luxembourg.
In cooperation with the Institut Pierre Werner Luxembourg.
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. He has published eleven novels to date, including “Paradise” (1994; nominated for the Booker Prize), “By the Sea” (2001; nominated for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award), “Desertion” (2006; nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) and “Afterlives” (2020; nominated for the Walter Scott Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction). Gurnah is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury.
© Lane + Co
Penguin
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
Nathalie Jacoby studied German and English literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where she received a doctorate in German Studies in 2000. She was visiting lecturer at the University of KwaZulu Natal Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and spent ten years working as producer and head writer for an audioguide company in London. After returning to Luxembourg, she taught German in Echternach and Mersch and joined the Luxembourgish Literature Archive (Centre national de littérature, CNL) as a scientific collaborator in 2015. In 2020 she was appointed director of the CNL. She has published on literary didactics and contemporary literature.
© Mikka Heinonen
November 28, 2025 | 7 p.m.
Institut Pierre Werner
28 rue Münster
2160 Luxemburg
Language: English
