Abdulrazak Gurnah Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
Source: New York Times
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday 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.” Gurnah was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 1948, but now lives in Britain.
He is the first African to win the award — considered the most prestigious in world literature — in almost two decades.He is the fifth overall, after Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, who won in 1988; and the South African winners Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and John Maxwell Coetzee in 2003.
Gurnah’s 10 novels include “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way” and “Dottie,” which all deal with the immigrant experience in Britain; “Paradise,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, about a boy in an East African country scarred by colonialism; and “Admiring Silence” about a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England, where he marries and becomes a teacher.
In the prelude to this year’s award, the literature prize was called out for lacking diversity among its winners. The journalist Greta Thurfjell, writing in Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, noted that 95 of the 117 past Nobel laureates were from Europe or North America, and that only 16 winners had been women. “Can it really continue like that?” she asked.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/books/nobel-prize-literature-abdulrazak-gurnah.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Congrats!
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#NobelPrize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.
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7:06 AM · Oct 7, 2021
