“It was never my ambition or intention to make a career of writing.”

So Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibar-born author of novels such as Memory of Departure (1987) and By the Sea (2001), tells Kirkus.

Speaking from his home in southeastern England, Gurnah continues, “I think that’s partly because there was no role model, no adult around who did that. So I didn’t think of writing as a career or a life. It was [after] coming to England more than 50 years ago, reading, and especially reading books that overlapped with my own experiences—my estrangement, my sense of being an alien, what I’d left behind—that I began to write, thinking that I had something to say. I kept it to myself, but then there comes a moment when one says not just ‘I want to do this,’ but ‘I have to do this.’ My ideas about writing changed enormously, certainly after the novels began to be published. You gain confidence, open up more, and in the end you’re absolutely fearless and say, ‘I’m going to write what I want.’ ”

Gurnah’s perseverance over half a century of living and writing among the descendants of his country’s former colonizers was rewarded last year with the Nobel Prize in literature. When the news arrived, Gurnah at first thought it was a practical joke, but the prize committee was earnest in honoring “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

That was all well and good, but, Gurnah insists, “I write about other themes as well.” Indeed, in his Nobel lecture, when he accepted the award, he mentioned writing about love and tenderness alongside alienation and poverty, noting that “writing cannot be just about battling and politics.…I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others.”

The latest of Gurnah’s 10 novels, Afterlives (Riverhead, Aug. 23), speaks to such matters. Much of the novel concerns the last days of the “scramble for Africa,” when, during World War I, Britain wrested what was then Tanganyika from its German colonizers in a war largely fought by proxy—that is, with African soldiers. A young man named Hamza, one of those soldiers, deserts from the German forces after being brutalized by an officer and, returning to his home village, falls in love with a young refugee named Afiya, who assures him that his poverty is nothing compared with their destiny together. “I have nothing,” he tells her, to which she replies, “We’ll have nothing together.”

Another character in Afterlives, though, speaks more pointedly to the novel’s title. Ilyas Hassan has gone off with the Schutztruppeto fight the British. He becomes a true believer, leaving his homeland to live among the people he served—and earning little but their disdain in return. Gurnah modeled the character after a Zanzibari soldier he discovered in the historical literature who worked his way to Germany as a waiter aboard an ocean liner, finally arriving there in the 1920s and enjoying a brief career as an actor before the rise of the Nazis. They repaid his loyalty by placing him in a concentration camp, where he died.

“Just three of my novels are historical,” says Gurnah. Afterlives can be thought of as a kind of continuation of Paradise (1994), in which the German conscription of African soldiers presents the protagonist, Yusuf, with an opportunity to escape ordinary life. That book was born, the author says, of a trip to Zanzibar that yielded not the tale he meant to write but instead one that, as he puts it, reflects his “being full of the location and full of the stories people told me of that time.” Yusuf is only 17 as Paradise opens, and Gurnah found himself pondering how such a young man would want to leave home to become a colonial soldier.

“This is the great thing about writing,” Gurnah tells Kirkus. “That story stayed with me, turning around in my mind. I know more, all these years later, and have thought more and have read more, and the time seemed right to return to that period. I wanted to tell a story with many ideas—about colonialism, about power, about the lives of people in those quiet seaside villages that didn’t see much directly of the war but felt it all the same. These are historical stories that aren’t often told, so our history is incomplete, and it seemed to me necessary to tell the story to include that point of view.”

Asked to describe a typical day of writing, Gurnah smiles good-naturedly and says, “Lately I’m talking with people like you, not writing.” Still, he says, having retired from university teaching five years ago, with Afterlives he was able for the first time to write a novel without interruption. “It’s quite nice to have no responsibilities other than the usual responsibilities of life, the cooking and shopping and gardening, dropping someone at the station,” he says. “I love being able to go to my desk in the morning and write until I get a headache.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.