Stockholm: Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, the Swedish Academy.
The 2021 Nobel Prize 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,” the Academy said in a statement.
Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.
Gurnah has become the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.
The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, recognise achievement in literature, science, peace and economics.