The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah whose novels deal with the violence, indignities and dislocations of colonialism and the refugee experience.
Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, but came as a refugee in the late 1960s to the UK where he now lives. The Swedish Academy praised him “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 award is the fifth time an African has won the prestigious literary prize.
In Gurnah’s 10 novels and numerous short stories, he has frequently tackled themes of exile, racism as well as immigration. While he writes mainly in English, his first language is Swahili, and his work features smatterings of Arabic and German.
Gurnah’s most recent novel Afterlives, published last year, was described by the Financial Times as “a book of quiet beauty and tragedy”. The novel, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in political writing/political fiction, tells the interwoven stories of four characters in east Africa when it was occupied by Germany before that country’s defeat in the first world war.
The story moves between a provincial town in what is now Tanzania and the exercise grounds and battlefields of the Schutztruppe, the German colonial army. Though it is told in a simple but lyrical language, the events described reveal shocking racism and violence, though they never stray into cliché or parable.
The narrative is always rooted in real human interactions. Ordinary people, affected by events over which they have little or no control, take centre stage.
Many of the stories flit between continents and cultures. Admiring Silence is about the difficulties faced by a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England, where he becomes a teacher. Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, tells the story of a boy in east Africa traumatised by colonialism.
Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said Gurnah’s novels, from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, the “magnificent” Afterlives, “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified east Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.
“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting — memories, names, identities,” he said. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”
