Meet Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Black African that won the 2021 Literature Nobel Prize

Abdulrazak Gunah is a Tanzanian novelist, who lives and works in the UK. He was born in Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous island off the east African coast, he left the island during the revolution at the age of 18 for the UK.

He began to write in English as a 21-year-old refugee in England, although Kiswahili is his first language. His first novel, Memory of Departure, was published in 1987.

He has written 10 novels and several short stories, including “Paradise,” which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. Gurnah’s writing explores the identity, displacement, and loss under east Africa’s complex colonial history.

Abdulrazak is a distinguished academic and critic, he lectured at the Bayero University, Kano in Nigeria from 1980 to 1982.  He was on the board of the Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African literature and has served as a contributing editor for the literary magazine Wasafiri for many years. Until his recent retirement, Gurnah was the Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Abdulrazak 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.”

He is the first writer from Tanzania to win the prestigious award and the first Black African writer to receive the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. The  Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about 980,000 euros, $1.1 million).