Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chronicler of Migrant Experience, Wins 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
World exclusive: Listen to our interview with 2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah on the value that refugees can bring to a country. #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/AkejPuzVjo
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021
As we blogged earlier this week, immigrants are running away with Nobel Prizes. Among the winners is Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 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 in Zanzibar. After the island liberated itself from the British Empire in 1963, a violent uprising led to widespread persecution of Arab-descended minorities. As a member of a targeted ethnic group, 18-year-old Gurnah was forced to seek refuge in England, writes Alison Flood for the Guardian.
Gurnah’s debut novel, Memory of Departure, relates the travails of a young man on the East African coast who comes of age under a totalitarian regime. In Paradise, which was described in Nobel announcement as his “breakthrough” work, Gurnah writes from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy who is forced into indentured servitude in East Africa in the years leading up to World War I.
KJ