Tanzania’s Abdulrazak Gurnah Named Winner Of 2021 Nobel Prize For Literature

• The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth a sum of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000)

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has said he was “surprised and humbled” to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.

The Swedish Academy praised him for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth a sum of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).

Seventy-three year-old Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including Paradise and Desertion.

“It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in.

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“It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it,” the septuagenarian added.

His work, ‘Paradise’ which was published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and was nominated for the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.

“Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking.

“His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.

“[His] characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved,” the Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement.

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.

Until his recent retirement, he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

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