Tanzania’s Abdulrazak Gurnah wins 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah on Thursday won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist 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,” tweeted the award-giving organisation.

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, and although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool.

He was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s. Until his recent retirement, he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.