Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, the award-giving body said. The prestigious prize was awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy, which cited Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents. Born in Zanzibar and based in England, Gurnah recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent.
He has published 10 novels and a number of short stories. He is best known for his 1994 novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Gurnah got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in southeast England.
“I think it’s just brilliant and wonderful,” Gurnah told Reuters news agency when asked how he felt to win the prize. “It’s just great – its just a big prize, and such a huge list of wonderful writers – I am still taking it in,” he said. It was such a complete surprise that I really had to wait until I heard it announced before I could believe it.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, called him “one of the world’s most prominent post-colonial writers. The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists whose work found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan were named as laureates of the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides. Still to come are prizes for outstanding work in the fields of peace and economics.
Source: aljazeera
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