The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 was awarded on October 7 to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “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 born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the end of the 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded by the Swedish Academy 114 times to 118 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021. This year’s award is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million USD).
