Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel prize in literature

Zanzibari novelist becomes first black African writer in 35 years to win prestigious award

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded 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 grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar before fleeing persecution and arriving in England as a student in the 1960s. He has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Tanzanian writer's novels - from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, Afterlives - recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world".