Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tanzanian novelist is the grand winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement was made this Thursday afternoon at a press conference broadcast online.
The author born on the island of Zanzibar was thus awarded this year's literary prize for his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration into the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the abyss between cultures and continents," the announcement, quoted by the news at the minute, reads.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s. Although his first language was Swahili, it was English that became his literary tool.
"Gurnah's displaced characters, in England or on the African continent, find themselves between cultures and continents, between the life left behind and the one to come. They face racism and prejudice, but also force themselves to silence the truth or to reinvent a biography to avoid a confrontation with reality," the academy further justified.
His portfolio includes more than 10 works, with emphasis on "Paradise" (1994), Desertion (2005) and By the Sea (2001). In Portugal, he has only published one book, Junto ao Mar, by Difel, in 2003.
Until his recent retirement he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
It is known that the Nobel Prize in Literature is a prize awarded annually since 1901 by the Swedish Academy to authors who have made outstanding contributions to the field of literature, and has a monetary value of more than 900,000 euros.
This is the fourth award to be announced by the Academy this week, after Medicine, Physics and Chemistry. Tomorrow the name of the Nobel Peace Prize will be known, but it will not be the last. On Monday, the 11th, the Nobel Prize for Economics will be announced.
Due to the restrictions imposed by Covid-19, and for the second year in a row, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature will receive the award in his home country and not in Stockholm, as is tradition.