Nobel Prize for Literature 2021 awarded
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The 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar for "uncompromising and compassionate delving into the effects of colonialism and the fate of a refugee in the gap between cultures and continents." This is only the fifth Nobel Prize in history for an African writer.
The writer was born in Zanzibar in 1948 but came to England as a refugee in the late 1960s. He was a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury.
Gurnah began writing at the age of 21. He has published ten novels and many short stories, and the topic of refugees is recurring in his work. The author creates in English. None of his books had been translated into Polish, and until the verdict of the Swedish Academy, he had not been mentioned in the Polish press either.
His breakthrough novel entitled "Paradise" from 1994 was created after a research trip to East Africa. As the Nobel Committee points out, it is a coming-of-age and a sad love story in which different worlds and belief systems collide.
