Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature for works that explore the legacies of imperialism on uprooted individuals. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”
Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah moved to Britain as a refugee in the 1960s. He is a professor at the University of Kent and the author of 10 novels, including “Paradise,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
The Chairman of the Nobel Committee, Anders Olsson, wrote in a statement:
“Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”
The statement further said, “In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now in ‘Afterlives’ (2020), as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”
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Notably, Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.
Last year’s prize went to American poet Louise Glück for what the judges described as her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, recognise achievement in literature, science, peace and economics.
