Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer resident in the United Kingdom, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, drawing on his experiences spanning continents and cultures to write books about the impact of migration on individuals and societies.
Gurnah’s “uncompromising and empathetic insight of the impacts of colonialism and the fate of the refugee,” according to the Swedish Academy, earned him the medal.
Gurnah, who just retired as a professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, received the call from the Swedish Academy in his kitchen in southeast England, and immediately mistook it for a joke.
The prize astonished and humbled him, he said.
The themes of migration and dislocation that Gurnah examined “are things that are with us every day” — even more so now than when he first arrived to Britain in the 1960s, according to Gurnah.
“People are dying and being injured all around the world. “We have to deal with these challenges in the most compassionate way possible,” he stated.
“It’s still settling in that the Academy has decided to spotlight these topics that run through my work; it’s critical to acknowledge and discuss them.”
Gurnah, who was born in 1948 on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, fled to the United Kingdom as an adolescent refugee in 1968, fleeing an oppressive regime that oppressed the Arab Muslim population to which he belonged.
After landing in England, he “stumbled into” writing as a way of addressing both the loss and emancipation of the emigrant experience.