Tanzanian writer awarded 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
STOCKHOLM: UK-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose experience of crossing continents and cultures has fed his novels about the impact of migration on individuals and societies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in southeast England.
“I’m absolutely excited,” he told The Associated Press. “I just heard the news myself.”
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, Gurnah moved to Britain as a teenage refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab-Muslim community to which he belonged.
He has said he “stumbled into” writing after arriving in England as a way of exploring both the loss and liberation of the emigrant experience. Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Paradise shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 - By the Sea and Desertion. Many of his works explore what he has called “one of the stories of our times”: the profound impact of migration both on uprooted people and the places they make their new homes.
Gurnah, whose native language is Swahili but who writes in English, is only the sixth Africa-born writer to be awarded the Nobel for literature, which has been dominated by European and North American writers since it was founded in 1901.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for literature, called him “one of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers”.
“His work gives us a vivid and very precise picture of another Africa not so well known for many readers, a coastal area in and around the Indian Ocean marked by slavery and shifting forms of repression under different regimes and colonial powers: Portuguese, Indian, Arab, German and the British,” he said.