The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah

[Eva Libre]

Credit: Getty Images David Levenson

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021, presented by Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on 7 October 2021.

Literature/2021/Nobel Prize-Announcement

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948 in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which is now part of present day Tanzania. He left the island at the age of 18 following the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution, arriving in England in 1968 as a refugee. Gurnah has been quoted saying, "I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same – more people are struggling and running from terror states.

Gurnah lives in Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom.

Much of Gurnah's work is set on the coast of East Africa, and all but one of his novels' protagonists were born in Zanzibar. Literary critic Bruce King argues that Gurnah's novels place East African protagonists in their broader international context, observing that, in Gurnah's fiction, "Africans have always been part of the larger, changing world". According to King, Gurnah's characters are often uprooted, alienated, unwanted and therefore are, or feel, resentful victims". Felicity Hand suggests that Gurnah's novels Admiring Silence, By the Sea, and Desertion (novel) all concern "the alienation and loneliness that emigration can produce and the soul-searching questions it gives rise to about fragmented identities and the very meaning of 'home'." She observes that Gurnah's characters typically do not succeed abroad following their migration, using irony and humour to respond to their situation.

Here are some of his works.

Writings

Novels

• Memory of Departure (1987)
• Pilgrims Way (1988)
• Dottie (1990)
• Paradise (1994)
• Admiring Silence (1996)
• By the Sea (2001)
• Desertion (2005)
• The Last Gift (2011)
• Gravel Heart (2017)
• Afterlives (2020)

Short stories

• "Cages" (1984), in African short stories.
• "Bossy" (1994), in African rhapsody: Short stories of the contemporary African Experience.
• "Escort" (1996)
• "The Photograph of the Prince" (2012)
• "My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa" (2006)
• "The Arriver's Tale", Refugee Tales (2016)
• "The Stateless Person’s Tale", Refugee Tales III (2019)

Essays, criticism and non-fiction

• "Matigari: A Tract of Resistance."
  
• "Imagining the Postcolonial Writer."
  
• "The Wood of the Moon."
• "Themes and structures in Midnight’s Children." In: The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Ed. by Abdulrazak Gurnah. University Press, Cambridge 2007.
• "Mid Morning Moon".
• Abdulrazak Gurnah (July 2011). "The Urge to Nowhere: Wicomb and Cosmopolitanism".
• "Learning to Read."

Much enjoyable hours of reading!