ABSTRACT
The modernist propensity to establish binaries has found its way into literary studies to create hierarchies that insist on the gradation of literary works. In as much as the so-called reputable literary writers on the East African literary scene such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Francis Imbuga and Nuruddin Farah have won literary prizes, a section of the audience has always been left with many questions with regard to the nature of canons used to determine the winners of these prizes. A segment of the East African audience has sustained scathing scepticism about the underlying canon applied to determine winners of the Nobel Prize. They cannot understand why Gurnah would win the Nobel and not Farah or Thiong’o. This chapter interrogates the flipside of the Nobel Prize on the East African Literary landscape with reference to selected works by Thiong’o, Farah and Gurnah. This analytical study is, therefore, a close textual reading of the primary and secondary texts while Bloom (1994) and Kleij (2019) serve as theoretical frameworks for interpretation.
