The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s «uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.»
U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose experience of crossing continents and cultures has fed his novels about the impact of migration on individuals and societies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.” Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in southeast England — and initially thought it was a prank. He said he was “surprised and humbled” by the award. Gurnah said the themes of migration and displacement that he explored “are things that are with us every day” — even more now than when he came to Britain in the 1960s. “People are dying, people are being hurt around the world. We must deal with these issues in the most kind way,” he said. “It’s still sinking in that the Academy has chosen to highlight these themes which are present throughout my work, it’s important to address and speak about them.” Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, Gurnah moved to Britain as a teenage refugee in 1968, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged. He has said he “stumbled into” writing after arriving in England as a way of exploring both the loss and liberation of the emigrant experience. Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Paradise” — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 — “By the Sea,” “Desertion” and “Afterlives.” The settings range from East Africa under German colonialism to modern-day England. Many explore what he has called “one of the stories of our times”: the profound impact of migration both on uprooted people and the places they make their new homes. Gurnah, whose native language is Swahili but who writes in English, is only the sixth Africa-born author to be awarded the Nobel for literature, which has been dominated by European and North American writers since it was founded in 1901.
