This year’s Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born novelist, as announced by the Swedish Academy earlier today, Thursday, October 7, 2021.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on Zanzibar island, off the coast of Tanzania. He arrived in England in the late 1960s as a refugee and began writing at 21. He has published ten novels and many more short stories. One of his most notable works is his 1994 novel called Paradise. His work explores colonialism and refugee life.
The Swedish Academy noted that the award 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,”
How the Nobel Prize is Announced
Last year, US poet Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize With120 years of the prize’s existence and 118 awardees, more than 80 percent of the past winners have been North Americans or Europeans. The prestigious prize comes with a sum of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) and a medal.
This year’s prize would have be presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death – December 10, 1896. However, this will not be the case for the second year straight with the scourge of COVID-19. This has now been effectively replaced with a televised ceremony with the Nobel Laureate receiving their prize in their home country.
