By Yusuf Boluwatife
The Swedish Academy has awarded Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature.
It praised Gurnah for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.
The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).
The 73-year-old author said how grateful he was to the academy, adding: “It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in.
“It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it.”
Paradise, one of the 10 books written by the Tanzanian writer was published in 1994, and it tells 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.
Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.
He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.
Gurnah is the second black African author to have won the award after Nigeria’s Professor Wole Soyinka, in 1986.
In an interview in 2016, when asked if he would call himself an “author of postcolonial and/or world literature,” Gurnah had replied saying “I would not use any of those words. I wouldn’t call myself a something writer of any kind.
“In fact, I am not sure that I would call myself anything apart from my name. I guess, if somebody challenges me, that would be another way of saying, ‘Are you a… one of these…?’ I would probably say ‘no’. Precisely, I don’t want that part of me having a reductive name.”
The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, recognise achievement in literature, science, peace and latterly economies.
