Who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021?

The novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 October 2021. He lives and works in England.

Gurnah was born on 20 December 1948 in the then Sultanate of Zanzibar, which is now part of present-day Tanzania. After fleeing Zanzibar at age 18 to escape the persecution of Arab citizens during the Zanzibar Revolution, he arrived in England in 1968 as a refugee. Gurnah has said, “I came to England when these words, such as asylum-seeker, were not quite the same - more people are struggling and running from terror states.”

The Zanzibar Revolution (Arabic: ثورة زنجبار‎ “Thawrat Zanjibār”) occurred in 1964 and led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar by local African revolutionaries. It was an ethnically diverse state consisting of a number of islands off the east coast of Tanganyika which had been granted independence by Britain in 1963.

Gurnah began to write in English as a 21-year-old refugee in England, although Kiswahili is his first language. His first novel, "Memory of Departure," was published in 1987. He is the author of 10 novels, including “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.

He is the first Tanzanian-born writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".