Abdulrazak Gurnah
Winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
Gurnah, won the Nobel Prize for Literature (2021). The motivation for the Prize was, “…for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist and academic who is based in the United Kingdom. He was born, December 20, 1948, in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution.
He is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. As of 2021 Gurnah has penned ten novels including Paradise, which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion; and By the Sea, which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.
He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury. Photo Credit: PalFest on Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel (cropped)
The Other Black Writers Who Have Won the Nobel Prize for Literature:
- Toni Morrison of the United States (1993)
- Derek Walcott of St. Lucia (1992)
- Wole Soyinka of Nigeria (1986)
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