The Nobel Prize for Literature Goes to Abdulrazak Gurnah

Last Thursday the Nobel Assembly announced they awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to Tanzanian writer 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." 

The Tanzanian novelist is the first Black writer to be awarded the prize since 1993, and only the fourth ever. since the prize's inception 120 years ago. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and arrived in Britain as an 18-year old refugee half a century ago. He recently retired as a professor of English and post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent. Gurnah says the themes of migration, displacement, and identity explored in his novels are even more urgent now than when he began his writing career with the mass movements of displaced people from Syria, Afghanistan and beyond.