Guest of the ilb 2002
Jamal Mahjoub was born in London in 1960. The family lived in Liverpool for several years before moving to the Sudan, the homeland of his father. Here Mahjoub went to school at the Comboni College which was led by Italian priests. Later he received a grant for the Atlantic College in Wales and then studied geology at Sheffield. Already during his studies, he published literary texts in magazines. Gradually journalistic works and translations followed. Today Mahjoub lives in Aarhus in Denmark – after many moves, Northern Europe has become his home, although in his books, his African roots are always present.
In Jamal Mahjoub’s world, languages and times melt into each other. Here literature and history meet, science and superstition and at the same time the conditions are discussed under which people from different cultures live with or alongside each other. His first three novels have all, more or less in a clear way, to do with the Sudan and its history, with that generation which lives in the North of the country, the Nubians, who fight for more equality between the ethnic groups, a generation to which Mahjoub’s father also belongs.
'Wings of Dust' from 1994 sketches the life of a Sudanese exile who precisely analyzes the years of independence. The last of these novels, 'In the Hour of Signs', tells of the British conquest of the Sudan at the end of the 19th century. The book transforms the main figures of this conflict, the Islamic leader Mohammed Ahmed, called Mahdi, and the English General Gordon into symbolic figures who only briefly appear. The main characters here are the farmers, herdsmen and the ordinary soldiers.
Jamal Mahjoub’s most recent book 'The Carrier' from 1998 is a historical novel concerned with the key moments of European thought: the development of the telescope and corresponding astronomical calculating methods which paved the way in the 17th century to the heliocentric picture of the world and to the division of science and religion. "I was fascinated by the question of why such a significant change in thought as was marked by the Renaissance in Europe, didn’t appear in the Islamic world", is how Mahjoub describes his motivation. The young scholar Raschid al-Kenzy, son of a Nubian slave and wrongly accused of murder, is pardoned by the God of the City of Algiers on the condition that he can bring him the optical instrument with which you can tell the most wonderful stories, and so Raschid starts a long journey.
With 'The Carrier', Jamal Mahjoub has written a novel about prejudices and scientific curiosity, a loosely connected book which tells of the drifting apart of the cultures and of the archaeology of knowledge. In 2006, he published 'The Drift Latitudes' and 'Nubian Indigo'. Majoub received the Guardian/Heinemann African Short Story Prize. His novel 'Travelling with Djinns' (2003) was awarded the Prix d'Astrobale. The author, editor and translator Jamal Mahjoub lives in Aarhus, Denmark.
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