Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize for Literature

What you need to know:

The prize is worth Sh2.6 billion, goes to a writer deemed to be, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

#NobelPrize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960’s. Until his recent retirement he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2021

According to Ellen Mattson, who sits on the Swedish Academy and the Nobel committee: “Literary merit. That’s the only thing that counts.”
The Nobel winner is chosen by the 18 members of the Swedish Academy – an august and mysterious organisation that has made efforts to become more transparent after it was hit by a sexual abuse and financial misconduct scandal in 2017.
Last year’s prize went to the American poet Louise Glück – an uncontroversial choice after the uproar provoked by the Austrian writer Peter Handke’s win in 2019.
Handke had denied the Srebrenica genocide and attended the funeral of war criminal Slobodan Milošević.
The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded 118 times. Just 16 have gone to women, seven of those coming in the 21st century. In 2019, the Swedish academy promised the award would become less “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric”, but proceeded to give its next two prizes to two Europeans, Handke and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize for Literature

What you need to know:

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