Refugee who fled to UK at 17 wins Nobel literature prize

A RETIRED university professor who arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1960s has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, 73, has written 10 novels including Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.

The Nobel committee praised his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Gurnah fled Tanzania, a former British protectorate, at 17 and came to England, where he studied before taking up a post at the University of Kent. Until his recent retirement, he was professor of English and postcolonial literature at the university’s School of English.

Gurnah was pottering around his kitchen yesterday morning when he received the call from the Swedish Academy. “It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it,” he said.

He told the BBC World Service: “I had no inkling whatsoever. When it gets to this time of year, various names are mentioned as possible candidates and I was thinking, ‘I wonder who will get it this year?’ I can’t yet fully describe just the tremendousness of being honoured in this way.” Gurnah was interviewed only minutes after hearing the news, and said that he had not considered the prize money. Told that it was 10 million Swedish crowns (£840,000), he said: “Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?”

He is the sixth African writer to win the prize since its founding in 1901 and the first black African writer to win since Wole Soyinka in 1986.