Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
He becomes only the second black African writer to win the prize since Professor Wole Soyinka in 1986.
Gurnah,73, who grew up in Zanzibar and arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories.
The Nobel committee said that “the theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work”.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m/£840,000).
The prize goes to a writer deemed to be, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.
Gurnah’s 10 novels include “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way” and “Dottie,” which all deal with the immigrant experience in Britain; “Paradise,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, about a boy in an East African country scarred by colonialism; and “Admiring Silence” about a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England, where he marries and becomes a teacher.
Winners have ranged from Bob Dylan, cited for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, to Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
