The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature announced on Thursday, by the Swedish Academy named Abdulrazak Gurnah as the winner. The Tanzanian novelist was surprised and humbled to be awarded with the Nobel Prize.
The writer’s ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration into the effects of colonialism’ was praised by the Swedish Academy while announcing the prize. The award is worth 10 million Swedish crowns which is equivalent to 1.14 million US dollar.
The 73 years old writer has written 10 novels which include Paradise and Desertion. Paradise, which was published in 1994, was about a boy who grew up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and won the Booker Prize. The Nobel Committee for Literature stated that Abdulrazak Gurnah’s aversion to simplification and his dedication to truth were striking.
Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s. He worked as Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury and retired recently. After Wole Soyinka, Gurnah is the first black African writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1986.
Gurnah said in an interview in 2016, that he came to England when words such as asylum-seeker did not mean the same. He said that more people were running away from terror states. He also added that his award made him hopeful of discussions about colonialism and refugee crisis which he has depicted in most of his writings.
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