Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurna (1948), who grew up on Fr. Zanzibar, but moved to England as a refugee in the late 1960s, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, according to the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy.
The prize was awarded to Gurna “for the uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the predestination of cultures and continents,” the committee said.
Gurna grew up on the island of Zanzibar, but arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.
He is the fifth African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after Volley Soinka of Nigeria in 1986, Nagib Mahfouz of Egypt, who won in 1988; and South African winners Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and John Maxwell Quetzi in 2003.
He writes in English. Author of the novels Paradise / 1994 /, In the Sea / 2001 /, Desertion / 2005 /, etc., unpublished in Bulgarian. The first and second novels were nominated for the Booker Prize, but did not win it.
Gurna’s 10 novels also include Remembrance of Departure, The Path of the Pilgrims, Dottie, Admired Silence.
