The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 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 was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.
Gurnah was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.