Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah bags the Nobel Prize in Literature

Gurnah has been awarded “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Stockholm: Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, the award-giving body said on Thursday (October 7). Gurnah, whose novels include "Paradise" and "Desertion", writes in English and lives in Britain. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).

The prizes, for achievements in science, literature and peace, were created through a bequest in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel. They have been awarded since 1901, with the final prize in the line-up - economics - a later addition. Past winners have primarily been novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, poets such as Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky and Rabindranath Tagore, or playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Eugene O'Neill.