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The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his “uncompromising and passionate” portrayals of the effects of colonialism.
Gurnah was born in Tanzania in 1948 but moved to England at a young age. He has written 10 novels, many of which focus on the refugee experience.
His 1994 novel “Paradise”, which tells the story of a boy who grew up in Tanzania at the turn of the 20th century, won the Booker Prize and marked his breakthrough as a novelist.
“The characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and an emerging life; it is a state of insecurity that can never be resolved,” said the Nobel Committee for Literature in a communicated.
Her 2001 novel “By the Sea” follows a refugee living in a British seaside town. And his most recent work, “Afterlives”, takes up the story of “Paradise” and takes place during the German colonization of Africa.
Before his retirement, Gurnah, 73, was also a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in England.
“Gurnah’s dedication to the truth and his aversion to oversimplification is striking,” the committee said. “It can make him gloomy and uncompromising, while at the same time following the destiny of individuals with great compassion and unwavering commitment.”
Previous Literature Prize winners are French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, British playwright Harold Pinter and novelists such as John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.
It was won more controversially by singer Bob Dylan in 2016, while the committee was criticized for awarding the 2019 title to Austrian writer Peter Handke despite controversial comments about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
The first Nobel Prize for Literature was the French poet Sully Prudhomme, winner of the inaugural prize in 1901.
This is the fourth Nobel Prize awarded this week, after the presentation of the three science prizes. The winner of the Peace Prize will be announced on Friday.
It’s a story of rupture. More details soon.
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