Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize in Literature

By Beyza Binnur Donmez

ANKARA (AA) - Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.

The Tanzanian novelist, who, as a young man, had arrived in the UK as a refugee, was awarded the prize "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 committee said.

Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and arrived in the UK at the end of the 1960s.

He has published ten novels and several short stories, while the theme of the refugee's plight and disruption runs throughout his work.