Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work touches on colonialism and refugee life, yesterday won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said.
Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar, but went to England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, was honored “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,” the Swedish Academy said.
Gurnah has published 10 novels and a number of short stories.
Photo: AFP
He is best known for his 1994 novel Paradise, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.
Born in 1948, Gurnah began writing as a 21-year-old.
Although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool.
The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million).
Last year, the award went to US poet Louise Gluck.
Ahead of yesterday’s announcement, Nobel watchers had said that the Swedish Academy might choose to give a nod to a writer from Asia or Africa, following a pledge to make the prize more diverse.
It has crowned mainly Westerners in its 120-year existence. Of the 118 literature laureates since the first Nobel was awarded in 1901, 95 — or more than 80 percent — have been Europeans or North Americans.
Gurnah would normally have received the Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm, but the in-person ceremony has been canceled for the second straight year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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