Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Abdulrazak Gurnah for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, which is now part of Tanzania, in 1948, but he currently lives in Britain. He left Zanzibar at age 18 as a refugee after a violent 1964 uprising in which soldiers overthrew the country’s government. He is the first African to win the award — considered the most prestigious in world literature — in more than a decade.
He is preceded by Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, who won in 1988; and the South African winners Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and John Maxwell Coetzee in 2003. The British-Zimbabwean novelist Doris Lessing won in 2007.
Gurnah’s 10 novels include Memory Of Departure, Pilgrims Way and Dottie, which all deal with the immigrant experience in Britain; Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, about a boy in an East African country scarred by colonialism; and Admiring Silence, about a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England, where he marries and becomes a teacher. His most recent work, Afterlives, explores the generational effects of German colonialism in Tanzania, and how it divided communities.
Gurnah’s first language is Swahili, but he adopted English as his literary language, with his prose often inflected with traces of Swahili, Arabic and German.
Anders Olsson, the chair of the committee that awards the prize, said at the news conference on Thursday that Gurnah “is widely recognised as one of the world’s more preeminent post-colonial writers”. Gurnah “has consistently and with great compassion, penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals”, he added.
The characters in his novels, Olsson added, “find themselves in the gulf between cultures and continents, between the life left behind and the life to come, confronting racism and prejudice, but also compelling themselves to silence the truth or reinventing biography to avoid conflict with reality”.
Laura Winters, writing in The New York Times in 1996, called Paradise “a shimmering, oblique coming-of-age fable”, adding that Admiring Silence was a work that “skillfully depicts the agony of a man caught between two cultures, each of which would disown him for his links to the other”.
The news of his Nobel was celebrated by fellow novelists and academics who say that his work deserves a wider audience.
The novelist Maaza Mengiste described Gurnah’s prose as being “like a gentle blade slowly moving in”.
“His sentences are deceptively soft, but the cumulative force for me felt like a sledgehammer,” she said.
“He has written work that is absolutely unflinching and yet at the same time completely compassionate and full of heart for people of East Africa,” she said. “He is writing stories that are often quiet stories of people who aren’t heard, but there’s an insistence there that we listen.”
In an interview with the website Africainwords earlier this year, Gurnah spoke about how, in his recent book, Afterlives, he was seeking to illuminate how people affected by war and colonialism are shaped but not defined by those experiences, and how it grew out of stories he heard growing up.
“I was surrounded by people who experienced these things firsthand and would talk about them,” he said. “These stories have been with me all along, and what I needed was time to organise them into this story. My scholarly work has also shaped these stories.”
Gurnah noted that throughout his career, he has been engaged with the questions of displacement, exile, identity and belonging.
“There are different ways of experiencing belonging and unbelonging,” he said. “How do people perceive themselves as part of a community? How are some included and some excluded? Who does the community belong to?