The Nobel Prize for Literature 2021 goes to the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in 1948 in Zanzibar and teaches in Cambridge. Since 1968 he 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. His novel “Paradise” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
Arriving in England as a refugee in the late 1960s, Gurnah was a professor of English at Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Caterburry, the prize is approximately $ 1.4 million.
In the motivation for the award, Swedish academics explain how his literature is “uncompromising and with a compassionate understanding of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees”.