Tom Fasano

Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded The 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.”

A native of Zanzibar, Gurnah fled persecution and emigrated to England in the 1960s to study. His books include 10 novels and many short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, noted that Gurnah’s novels “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

The prize hasn’t been awarded to a black African author since 1986, when Wole Soyinka won. He is the first black writer since Toni Morrison in 1993 to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize. 2001 saw his sixth novel, By the Sea, longlisted for the prize. Olsson said that Paradise “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness.”

“[Gurnah] has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals,” Olsson told reporters in Stockholm. Gurnah said he believed it was a set-up when he was told of his victory in his kitchen.

“I thought it was a prank,” he said. “These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand, or sometimes months beforehand, about who are the runners, so it was not something that was in my mind at all. I was just thinking, I wonder who’ll get it?”

“I am honoured to be awarded this prize and to join the writers who have preceded me on this list. It is overwhelming and I am so proud.”

He has never before received due recognition for his work, according to his longtime editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle.

“He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it’s just killed me. I did a podcast last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that has been just ignored. And now this has happened,” she said.

In explaining Gurnah’s work, Pringle said it’s always dealt with displacement, “but in the most beautiful and haunting ways of what it is that uproots people and blows them across continents.”

“It’s not always asylum seeking, it can be so many reasons, it can be trade, it can be commerce, it can be education, it can be love,” she said. “The first of his novels I took on at Bloomsbury is called By the Sea, and there’s this haunting image of a man at Heathrow airport with a carved incense box, and that’s all he has. He arrives, and he says one word, and that’s ‘asylum.’”

“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense,” said Olsson. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

In 2017, after criticism regarding financial misconduct and sexual abuse, the Swedish Academy made steps to become more transparent in deciding the Nobel Prize. After the uproar generated by Peter Handke’s win in 2019, the American poet Louise Glück won the prize last year, a decision that wasn’t subject to controversy.