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Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah on Thursday received the Nobel Literature Prize.
- Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee expertise, on Thursday received the Nobel Literature Prize.
- Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar however who arrived in England as a refugee on the finish of the Sixties, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.
- Gurnah was honoured “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the consequences of colonialism and the destiny of the refugee within the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee expertise, on Thursday received the Nobel Literature Prize.
Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar however who arrived in England as a refugee on the finish of the Sixties, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.
The Swedish Academy mentioned Gurnah was honoured “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the consequences of colonialism and the destiny of the refugee within the gulf between cultures and continents”.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the consequences of colonialism and the destiny of the refugee within the gulf between cultures and continents.” pic.twitter.com/zw2LBQSJ4j— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021
“His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in different components of the world,” the Nobel Basis added.
Gurnah has revealed 10 novels and various brief tales.
He’s greatest identified for his 1994 breakthrough novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa throughout World Conflict I, 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 fled Zanzibar in 1968 following the revolution which led to oppression and the persecution of residents of Arab origin.
He started writing as a 21-year-old in England. Though Swahili was his first language, English grew to become his literary device.
In an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2004, Gurnah mentioned he hadn’t deliberate to be a author when he was residing in Zanzibar, however as soon as in England he felt overwhelmed by the sense of ‘a life left behind’.
He wrote:
If a technique of seeing distance as useful to the author footage her or him as a closed world, one other argument suggests displacement is critical, that the author produces work of worth in isolation as a result of she or he is then free from obligations and intimacies that mute and dilute the reality.
Gurnah has till his current retirement been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures on the College of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers reminiscent of Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.
The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of $1.1 million.
Final yr, the award went to US poet Louise Gluck.
Forward of Thursday’s announcement, Nobel watchers had urged the Swedish Academy may select to present the nod to a author from Asia or Africa, following a pledge to make the prize extra various.
It has topped primarily Westerners in its 120-year existence.
Obviously, 102 males have received and solely 16 girls.
The Academy lengthy insisted its laureates had been chosen on literary advantage alone, and that it didn’t take nationality under consideration.
However after a #MeToo scandal that rocked the Academy – prompting it to postpone the 2018 prize for a yr – the physique mentioned it might alter its standards in direction of extra geographic and gender variety.
“Beforehand, we had a extra Eurocentric perspective of literature, and now we’re wanting everywhere in the world,” the top of the Nobel committee, Anders Olsson, mentioned in 2019.
Two girls have since obtained the nod: Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk clinched the delayed 2018 prize, and little-known American poet Louise Gluck received in 2020.
Sandwiched between them in 2019 was Austrian author Peter Handke – a hotly contested decide on account of his help of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, who died whereas on trial for genocide in 2006.
However on the finish of the day, “literary advantage” continues to be “absolutely the and the one criterion” for the Academy, Olsson reiterated in an interview with The New Republic revealed this week.
The Nobel season continues Friday in Oslo with the Peace Prize, adopted subsequent Monday by the Economics Prize.
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