Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.



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Abdulrazak Gurnah received the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the judges described as his uncompromising and compassionate presentation of the outcomes of colonialism and the destiny of refugees.

Mr. Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar, now component of Tanzania. He arrived in the U.K. as a refugee at the stop of the nineteen sixties. Until finally his the latest retirement, he was professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Mr. Gurnah has posted 10 novels, together with “Paradise,” a story established throughout Germany’s colonization of Zanzibar, off Africa’s east coast. Other is effective contain “Desertion” and “By the Sea,” along with quick tales.

Mr. Gurnah left Zanzibar amid a violent revolution on the island. His get the job done appears to be at the outcomes of the various waves of colonialism on his homeland, which has witnessed Portuguese, Arab, Indian, German and British rulers, reported the Swedish Academy, which awards the yearly prize.

“The topic of the refugee’s disruption operates during his get the job done,” the academy reported. His “characters come across themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a everyday living that was and a everyday living emerging.”

In his career of additional than thirty many years, Mr. Gurnah has upended the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations, the academy reported.

Mr. Gurnah was not between the favorites to win the award. The preceding year’s winner was Louise Glück, the U.S. poet.

Create to Alistair MacDonald at [email protected]

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