Nobel Prize for Literature 2021

 Abdul Razak Gurnah (72 years) has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for the year 2021. He has written ten novels and a number of short stories.

The Swedish Academy who announces the Nobel Prize has said, “ Abdul Razak Gurnah has been honoured for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Anders Olson, the head of the Academy’s Global Committee felt Gurnah has introduced culturally diversified East Africa in his works. 

Abdul Razak Gurnah was born in Tanzania, he left his hometown in the island of Zanzibar in 1960 as a refugee when the regime under President Abeid Karume started persecuting citizens of Arab Origin. After the peaceful liberation from the British Colonial rule the country went through a revolution and he sought refuge in Britain. He was allowed to visit Zanzibar in 1984 to see his father briefly before his death.

Gurnah’s wrote on post colonialism and the trauma of refugee experience in many of his work which include popular novels like;

Admiring silence – 1996

By the Sea – 2001

His novel “Paradise” which was short listed for Booker Prize for fiction was set in Colonial East Africa. He is the fifth African to win the Nobel Prize, the last one was Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007 and the second writer of color from Sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka who won in 1986.

Swahili is Gurnah’s mother tongue but he wrote all his work in English since his first work which he wrote at the age of twenty one. According to the Swedish Academy he was inspired by Persian and Arab poetry as well as Koran but English Language tradition from William Shakespeare to VS Naipaul had its influence on his work too.

Gurnah was so surprised by the honour that he said, “it was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it.”

Congratulation Abdul Razak Gurnah, thank you for enriching our lives with your thoughts and words.