Swedish Academy recognises Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah as the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.
Until his recent retirement, Abdulrazak Gurnah was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in island of Zanzibar in 1948. He arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s. Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.
The Prize Motivation
The award-giving body said in a statement, “the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 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.”
The 73 years old novelist has
published ten novels and a number of short stories. According to the Swedish Academy, “the theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and even though Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool. He has said that in Zanzibar, his access to literature in Swahili was virtually nil and his earliest writing could not strictly be counted as literature. Arabic and Persian poetry, especially ‘The Arabian Nights’, were an early and significant wellspring for him, as were the Quran’s surahs. But the English-language tradition, from Shakespeare to V. S. Naipaul, would especially mark his work. That said, it must be stressed that he consciously breaks with convention, upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations.”
Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of The Swedish Academy describe Gurnah’s work, “an unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in ‘Afterlives’ (2020), as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.” The prestigious prize worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).
His reaction
The award pronounced on Thursday, GurnahX, who was in the kitchen when he was informed of his win, said that he believed it was a wind-up.
“I thought it was a prank,” he said. “These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand, or sometimes months beforehand, about who are the runners, so it was not something that was in my mind at all. I was just thinking, I wonder who’ll get it?”
Alexandra Pringle who was his longtime editor at Bloomsbury, said Gurnah’s win was “most deserved” for a writer who has not previously received due recognition.
