Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 to Abdulrazak Gurnah

2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to the writer Abdulrazak Gurnah “for the inflexible and compassionate understanding of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees”. Thus the Swedish Royal Academy motivated the choice of the assignment of the literary recognition for 2021. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar in 1948 and since 1968 has lived in England, where he first went to study and where he later became a professor of English literature at the University of Kent. Considered one of the most brilliant authors of post-colonial African literature, he is the author of acclaimed novels such as “Il desertore”, “Paradiso” and “Sulla riva del mare”, published in Italian by Garzanti. novel “Paradise” (1994), with which he was in the final at the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize. “Desertion” (2005) and “By the Sea” (2001) were selected for the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Born on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, Gurnah went to Great Brittany as a student in 1968. From 1980 to 1982 he taught at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD in 1982 and was then appointed Professor and Head of the English Department. As a scholar he has devoted himself to research on postcolonial fiction and issues associated with colonialism, especially with regard to Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has edited two volumes of “Essays on African Writing” and has published articles on several writers contemporary postcolonials, including VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zoë Wicomb. He is editor of “A Companion to Salman Rushdie” (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has collaborated with “Wasafiri” magazine since 1987. Gurnah has supervised university research projects on the fiction of Rushdie, Naipaul, GV Desani, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid.