Abdulrazak Gurnah has become Tanzania’s first winner of the Nobel prize for Literature in 2021.
The Nobel Prize for literature is the highest award for literature and judgment is based on the work of the writer. The prize has been in existence for 120 years and has been awarded to writers from the African continent five times.
Abdulrazak is the fifth winner of the prize and has become the first Tanzanian to win the prize. He is 73 years of age and operates from the United Kingdom after moving there from his motherland as a refugee in the 1960s.
Abdulrazak becomes the first black African writer to win the prize after Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian, won it in 1986.
According to the Swedish academy, Abdulrazak was awarded the prize owing to his “compassionate and uncompromising penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.