7 OCTOBER 2021

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH WON

NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2021

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021.

“I was just thinking ‘I wonder who’ll get it’.  I thought it was a prank, I really did,” just after hearing the news, Abdulrazak Gurnah responded.

“A kind of miserliness, as if there isn’t enough to go around. When many of these people who come, come out of first need, and because quite frankly they have something to give.  A lot of them are talented, energetic people, who have something to give,”  Abdulrazak Gurnah describes the attitude of some in Europe to refugees”, said in a telephonic interview released by Nobel Prize Committee on 7 October 2021

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of 1960’s.

He has published 10 novels and a number of short stories.

His famous novel Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction focuses on colonialism and the trauma that the refugees experienced during the revolution period in his native country.

He won 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.”