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Abdulrazak Gurnah was named the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature this morning. He was honored "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 Zanzibar but has lived in Britain for most of his life. He recently retired as a professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent.
"Gurnah has published 10 novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work," said the bibliographical notes provided by the Swedish Academy.
The academy added that “it must be stressed that he consciously breaks with convention, upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations. Thus, his novel Desertion (2005) about a love affair becomes a blunt contradiction to what he has called ‘the imperial romance,’ where a conventionally European hero returns home from romantic escapades abroad, upon which the story reaches its inevitable, tragic resolution. In Gurnah, the tale continues on African soil and never actually ends. In all his work, Gurnah has striven to avoid the ubiquitous nostalgia for a more pristine pre-colonial Africa. His own background is a culturally diversified island in the Indian Ocean, with a history of slave trade and various forms of oppression under a number of colonial powers -- Portuguese, Indian, Arab, German and British -- and with trade connections with the entire world. Zanzibar was a cosmopolitan society before globalization.”
"Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking," the academy added. "This can make him bleak and uncompromising, at the same time as he follows the fates of individuals with great compassion and unbending commitment. His novels 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. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense."
