Tanzanian Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah Wins Nobel Prize For Literature

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced the award in Stockholm Thursday.

The Academy said Gurnah was honored “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 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960’s.

Gurnah recently retired as Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He has been focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.

Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile.

He consciously breaks with convention, upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations. His novel Desertion (2005) about a love affair becomes a blunt contradiction to what he has called “the imperial romance.”

In all his work, Gurnah has striven to avoid the ubiquitous nostalgia for a more pristine pre-colonial Africa.

Gurnah’s writing is from his time in exile but pertains to his relationship with the place he had left. His debut novel Memory of Departure, written in 1987, is about a failed uprising in the African continent.

In the second work, Pilgrims Way (1988), Gurnah explores the multifaceted reality of life in exile.

the third novel, Dottie (1990), is a portrait of a Black woman of immigrant background growing up in harsh conditions in racially charged 1950’s England.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise (1994), was his breakthrough as a writer. It is characteristic of Gurnah to frustrate the reader’s expectations of a happy ending, or an ending conforming to genre.

Gurnah’s latest novel, the magnificent Afterlives, written last year, takes up where Paradise ends.

“An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee,” Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Prize Committee, said in a statement.

The Nobel laureate will get 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.13 million) as prize amount.

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