Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, 72, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing on the “effects of colonialism（殖民主义） and the fate of the refugee”, the award-giving body said on Thursday.
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, Gurnah moved to Britain as a young refugee in 1968. He fled following the country’s liberation from British rule because then-President Abeid Karume’s regime(政权) mistreated Gurnah’s Arab Muslim community.
Gurnah is the first African writer to win the award since the Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007. Among the winners, he is only the second writer of color from sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, who won in 1986.
Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including Memory of Departure, and Pilgrims Way. His novel Paradise is set in colonial East Africa during the First World War. Many of his works explore what he has called “one of the stories of our times”, the deep influence of migration both on people and the places where they make their new homes.
Gurnah recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent. He got the call from the Swedish Academy in his home in southeast England.
“I think it’s just brilliant and wonderful,” Gurnah said when asked how he felt to win the prize. “It’s just great—it’s just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers. I am still taking it in,” he said. He has said he “stumbled into” writing after arriving in England as a way of exploring the emigrant experience—both the loss and liberation.
Gurnah’s native language is Swahili, but he writes in English. He is only the sixth Africa-born writer to be awarded the Nobel for literature.
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