Nobel Prizes 2021: Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah

This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Abdulrazak Gurnah. This was announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

The Tanzanian writer is honored “for his uncompromising and compassionate understanding of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents,” according to the jury’s verdict.

With “Paradise” Gurnah was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1994. Since then, the novel has been read by literary scholars as a mirror story to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, which redirects the view of the colonized in Africa to the colonizers. His latest novel “Afterlives” (2020, Bloomsbury) is set against the background of German colonial rule in today’s Tanzania and the uprisings against it. Gurnah’s works, who lives in the UK, have not been translated into German since 2006. At that time the novel “Die Abtrünnigen” was published by Berlin Verlag.

The prize has been awarded annually in Stockholm since 1901. Bookmakers had reckoned French writer Annie Ernaux had good chances this year. The American writer Louise Glück received an award last year.

This year’s winners in the scientific categories of medicine, physics and chemistry were announced in Stockholm in the first half of the week. Among them were two Germans, the meteorologist Klaus Hasselmann and the chemist Benjamin List.