Abdulrazak Gurnah has been named the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature 2021.
Gatekeepers News reports that the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).
Announcing him as the winner on Thursday, the Academy praised Gurnah for for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.
Paradise, a book by the novelist published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and won the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.
The Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement, “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.”
He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.
Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986
