POST COLONIAL NOVELIST

African novelist, refugee Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize in Literature


Abdulrazak Gurnah, an African immigrant who often detailed the experiences of refugees and the impact of colonialism, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Image courtesy of Nobel Prize/Twitter


Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Novelist and retired English Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, an African immigrant who detailed the experiences of refugees and the impact of colonialism, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Born in Zanzibar, Gurhah is the fifth African to win the award. He was raised on the autonomous island off the eastern coast of Tanzania before his family emigrated to Britain as refugees in the 1960s.




An author of 10 novels, he recently retired from the University of Kent in Canterbury.

In Thursday's announcement, the Swedish Academy said Gurnah was recognized "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Three of Gurnah's novels -- Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way and Dottie -- all focused on being an immigrant in Britain. His novel Paradise, about an African boy dealing with colonialism, made the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1994.



Gurnah's was the fourth Nobel Prize awarded this week. The fifth and final official award, the Nobel Peace Prize, will be given out on Friday. A semiofficial prize, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, will be awarded on Monday.

U.S.-based scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Syukuro Manabe, a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi on Tuesday. Professor David MacMillan of Princeton University and German scientist Benjamin List won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday.

Nobel literary winner: UK govt lacks compassion for refugees

Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah poses ahead of a press conference in London, Friday, Oct. 8, 2021. Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism." (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

LONDON (AP) — Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah on Friday criticized the “lack of compassion” of governments, including Britain’s, that treat migrants as a problem or a threat.

Gurnah grew up on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee in the 1960s. He has drawn on his experiences for 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Afterlives” and the Booker Prize finalist “Paradise.”

Announcing the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, the Swedish Academy said the award recognized Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

He is only the sixth person born in Africa to win the world’s most prestigious literary accolade, first awarded in 1901. The prize carries a purse of 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million) from a bequest by founder Alfred Nobel.

Gurnah said migration is “not just my story … It’s a phenomenon of our times.”

The 72-year-old novelist said the tribulations faced by migrants hadn’t lessened in the decades since he left his homeland.

“It might seem as if things have moved on, but once again you get new arrivals, same old medicine,” Gurnah told reporters a day after winning the prize. “Same old ugliness in the newspapers, the mistreatment, the lack of compassion from the government.”

Gurnah said Britain has become more aware of racism over the decades and had “accelerated” discussion of its imperial past. But “institutions, it seems to me, are just as mean, just as authoritarian as they were.”

Gurnah said Britain’s detention of asylum-seekers and the Windrush scandal, in which thousands of long-term residents of the U.K. from the Caribbean were caught up in crackdown on illegal immigration, “seem to me to be just continuations of the same ugliness.”

Gurnah, who holds British citizenship and recently retired as a professor of literature at the University of Kent, urged governments to stop seeing migrants as a problem to be solved.

“These people are not coming with nothing,” he said. “They are coming with youth, with energy, with potential.”

___

Follow AP’s Nobel Prizes coverage at https://www.apnews.com/NobelPrizes and global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration