Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Noble Prize in literature,the award giving body said.
He was given the award for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Gurnah was born in the Zanzibar and based in England, he recently retired as a professors of the post-colonial literature at the university of Kent.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Tanzanian writer’s novels, from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, the “magnificent”, Afterlives, “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish Kronor (1.14m).
No black African writer has won the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Gurnah is the first Tanzanian writer to win.
Anders Olsson said Gurnah was in the kitchen when he was informed of his win and the committee had “a long and very positive” conversation with him.
She said
“He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him. And it’s killed me. It just killed me. I did a podcast last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that, you know, has been just ignored. He’s been ignored. And now this has happened,”.
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