did. Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, landing him in the company of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus and William Faulkner, and he became the first Black laureate since Toni Morrison in 1993. The news sent booksellers across the world scrambling to stock his novels and set off a frenzy to secure translation and reprint rights. His agent, Peter Straus, says foreign rights to his books have sold in “30 territories and rising”.
After the Nobel announcement, Straus began fielding bids from six American publishers for Afterlives. US rights to the novel sold to Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Random House, which plans to release it in August 2022. Riverhead also acquired North American rights to two older Gurnah books, By the Sea and Desertion that had gone out of print.
Rebecca Saletan, who acquired the books for Riverhead, said in a news release that she was drawn to the “combination of narrative magic and a deeply inhabited and often devastating portrayal of the colonial and postcolonial experience” in Gurnah’s work.
But as offers poured in from international publishing houses, many readers who were eager to sample Gurnah’s work were frustrated. The audience was suddenly there, but copies of his books were not — in several cases, even e-book and audiobook versions aren’t available.
The reasons for the shortfall are manifold. Because of the low demand for Gurnah’s work over the decades, many of his titles were out of print in the United States and in low stock in Britain. And supply-chain problems – with backups at paper mills, printing presses, shipping containers and warehouses – have made it difficult to get new copies printed now that demand has spiked.
It’s not unusual for publishers and booksellers to be caught off guard by the Nobel. Unlike other major literary prizes, like the Booker and the National Book Awards, which announce long-listed contenders and finalists in advance, the Nobel is a black box, and it has often been awarded to writers with low international profiles, including German writer Herta Muller, Austrian playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek, and French novelist Patrick Modiano. In some instances, publishing houses have had to quickly acquire rights and commission translations.
