Stockholm:
Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work touches on colonialism and refugee life, on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize, the Swedish Academy mentioned.
Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but came to England as a refugee at the finish of the 1960s, was honoured “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 Swedish Academy mentioned.
Gurnah has published 10 novels and a quantity of brief stories.
He is very best recognized for his 1994 novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa through the First World War, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs all through his work.
Born in 1948, Gurnah started writing as a 21-year-old in England. Although Swahili was his very first language, English became his literary tool.
The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about 980,000 euros, $1.1 million).
Last year, the award went to US poet Louise Gluck.
Ahead of Thursday’s announcement, Nobel watchers had recommended the Swedish Academy could decide on to give the nod to a writer from Asia or Africa, following a pledge to make the prize more diverse.
It has crowned primarily Westerners in its 120-year existence.
Of the 118 literature laureates because the very first Nobel was awarded in 1901, 95 — or more than 80 per cent — have been Europeans or North Americans.
Gurnah would have commonly received the Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who made the prizes in his last will and testament.
But the in-particular person ceremony has been cancelled for the second straight year due to the pandemic and replaced with a televised ceremony displaying the laureates getting their awards in their home nations.
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