UK-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah has been honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work explores the profound impact of migration on people who were displaced, and the places they make their new homes.
The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah's “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism, and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
In a tweet, Gurnah said he was "surprised and humbled" with the honour. He dedicated the Nobel Prize to Africa and Africans and all his readers.
Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah moved to Britain as a teenage refugee after an uprising on the Indian Ocean island in 1968. He recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent in the UK.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” and others.
'Paradise', published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and was nominated for the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.
Gurnah, whose native language is Swahili, but who writes in English, is only the sixth Africa-born writer to be awarded the Nobel for literature.