Literature Nobel awarded to UK writer

THE Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a retired professor at the University of Kent yesterday.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, 73, was praised for his ‘uncompromising and compassionate’ writing on ‘the effects of colonialism’.

The Swedish Academy, which chooses the winner, also commended the Tanzanianborn writer for his exploration of ‘the fate of the refugee’. Mr Gurnah, pictured, has written ten novels, including By The Sea, Desertion, and Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.

The recently retired professor of postcolonial literature moved from Zanzibar to Britain as a teenage refugee after a violent uprising on the Indian Ocean island, which led to state persecution of his Arab community.

Mr Gurnah, now based in Canterbury, said he considers himself ‘a novelist from Zanzibar who lives in Britain’. Anders Olsson, from the Nobel academy, said his characters ‘find themselves in the gulf between cultures... between the life left behind and the life to come, confronting racism and prejudice, but also compelling themselves to silence the truth’. He said the novelist was one of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers. Mr Gurnah said he was surprised and humbled to win the £837,000 prize. He told the Daily Mail he initially suspected it was a prank. Describing the academy’s phone call, he said: ‘I thought, “Is this somebody playing a joke?” These days you get a lot of these cold calls. But they told me I had won the prize.’

Discussing the themes of his novels, he said: ‘I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states.

‘The world is much more violent than it was in the 1960s, so there is now greater pressure on the countries that are safe, they inevitably draw more people. It’s still sinking in that the academy has chosen to highlight these themes... it’s important to address and speak about them.’