Abdulrazak Gurnah wins 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar and active in England.

“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, 73, is the author of 10 novels, including Paradise and Desertion. He said how grateful he was to the academy, adding: “It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in. “It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it.”

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s. He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement. 

He said his award would mean issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, which he has experienced, will be “discussed”.

“These are things that are with us every day. People are dying, people are being hurt around the world – we must deal with these issues in the most kind way,” he said.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Gurnah’s novels – from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, Afterlives– “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.

List of his Novels –

1.   Memory of Departure

2.   Pilgrims Way

3.   Dottie

4.   Paradise

5.   Admiring Silence

6.   By the Sea

7.   Desertion

8.   The Last Gift

9.   Afterlives

10. Gravel Heart

#StoryBerrys