Tanzanian novelist wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, it was announced on Thursday.

The Academy praised Gurnah for for his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.

He is the author of 10 novels and several short stories. He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.

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