The native of Zanzibar, author of ten novels, including “Paradise” and “near the sea”, has been rewarded for his “empathetic and uncompromising colonialism effects”.
Le Monde with AFP
The Nobel Prize for Literature 2021 has been awarded to the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, announced the Swedish Academy, Thursday, October 7th. The author, particularly known for his Paradise Roman (1994), was rewarded for his “empathic and without compromise of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees between cultures and continents”, according to the jury.
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah arrived in the United Kingdom as a refugee in the late 1960s. He is the author of ten novels, including near the sea in 2001, and news. He lives in Brighton and teaches at Kent University.
On the 118 laureates in literature since the creation of prices, 95, more than 80% are Europeans or North Americans – France alone has gleaned 13% of the prices. They are 102 men on the record for 16 women. Since 2012 and the Chinese Mo Yan – and to Abdulrazak Gurnah -, only Europeans or North Americans had been sacred and the audacity had rather manifested in the eclecticism of the genre – like Bob Dylan in 2016.
The ten previous laureates of the Literature Nobel Prize:
- 2020: Louise Glück (USA)
- 2019: Peter Handke (Austria)
- 2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)
- 2017: Kazuo Ishigaro (United Kingdom)
- 2016: Bob Dylan (USA)
- 2015: Svetlana Alexievitch (Belarus)
- 2014: Patrick Modiano (France)
- 2013: Alice Munro (Canada)
- 2012: mo yan (China)
- 2011: Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden)