Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah wins 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

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07-Oct-21

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Based in Britain, Gurnah is the first African writer to win the award since the Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007, and only the second writer of colour from sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won in 1986.
Tanzania's Abdulrazak Gurnah, novelist of colonialism and refuge, wins 2021 Nobel
Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, 72, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee," the award-giving body said on Thursday.
Based in Britain, Gurnah is the first African writer to win the award since the Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007, and only the second writer of colour from sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won in 1986.
His novels include "Paradise", which is set in colonial East Africa during the First World War and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction, and "Desertion".
"In his ten novels he 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," Anders Olsson, head of the Swedish Academy Nobel Committee, told reporters.
Gurnah left Africa as a refugee in the 1960s amid the persecution of citizens of Arab origin under President Abeid Karume's regime in Zanzibar where he grew up, when the peaceful liberation from British colonial rule led to a revolution.
He was only able to return to Zanzibar in 1984, allowing him to see his father shortly before his death.
Gurnah's was the second literature Nobel in a row, and the fourth of the last six, to go to a writer in English, an unusually long stretch for the prize to be dominated by a single language.