Tanzanian Author, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wins 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature
By Yinka Olatunbosun
The 73-year-old Tanzanian author, Abdulrazak Gurnah, has been declared the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, made the announcement.
In honouring him with this prize, the Swedish Academy acknowledged his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.
The prize, which is now worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m/£840,000) was awarded last year to an American poet Louise Gluck.
Thus, Gurnah’s win makes him the first black African to have won the prize since Wole Soyinka did in 1986.
The author of 10 novels, including ‘Paradise and Desertion’, was born in Zanzibar in 1948.
Later, he arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s. This explains why the theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.
He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until he retired recently.
Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.
He said his award would mean issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, which he has experienced, will be “discussed”.
“These are things that are with us every day. People are dying, people are being hurt around the world – we must deal with these issues in the most kind way,” he said.
Past winners included novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, poets such as Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, and playwrights including Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill.
