The Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose 10th novel Afterlives we covered, has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy chose 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.”
Gurnah was Professor of English at the University of Kent. His fourth novel, Paradise (1994), set in a fictional town in Tanzania, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. His sixth novel, By the Sea (2001), was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. His other novels are Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Admiring Silence (1996), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011), and Gravel Heart (2017). He was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2016.
Read Open Country Mag’s report HERE.
Image credit: Frank Augstein/AP.
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