Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience. (Photo: Luke Lung)
Cover Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience. (Photo: Luke Lung)

Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience, on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but who arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

The Swedish Academy said Gurnah was honoured "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

"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," the Nobel Foundation added. Gurnah has published 10 novels and a number of short stories.

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Tatler Asia
Copies of "Afterlives" by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah are displayed at Waterstones bookshop in central London on October 7, 2021. - Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience, won the Nobel Literature Prize. (Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP)
Above Copies of "Afterlives" by Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah are displayed at Waterstones bookshop in central London on October 7, 2021. - Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience, won the Nobel Literature Prize. (Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP)

He is best known for his 1994 breakthrough novel Paradise, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The theme of the refugee's disruption runs throughout his work. Born in 1948, Gurnah fled Zanzibar in 1968 following the revolution which led to oppression and the persecution of citizens of Arab origin. He began writing as a 21-year-old in England. Although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool.

In an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2004, Gurnah said he hadn't planned to be a writer when he was living in Zanzibar, but once in England he felt overwhelmed by the sense of 'a life left behind'.

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"If one way of seeing distance as helpful to the writer pictures him or her as a closed world, another argument suggests displacement is necessary, that the writer produces work of value in isolation because he or she is then free from responsibilities and intimacies that mute and dilute the truth," he wrote. Gurnah has until his recent retirement been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Salman Rushdie.

The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about 980,000 euros, $1.1 million).

Last year, the award went to US poet Louise Gluck.

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