Nobel Prize / Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 awarded to Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah

Washington: Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960’s. Until recently, he was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury and has published ten novels and a number of short stories.

"The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool," The Swedish Academy said in a statement. The statement added that Abdulrazak Gurnah consciously breaks with convention, upending the colonial perspective to highlight that of the indigenous populations. Thus, his novel ‘Desertion’ (2005) about a love affair becomes a blunt contradiction to what he has called “the imperial romance”.

The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Sweden.

The academy said that Alfred Nobel had broad cultural interests. During his early youth, he developed his literary interests, which lasted throughout his life. His library consisted of a rich and broad selection of literature in different languages. During the last years of his life, he tried his hand as an author and began writing fiction.

Literature was the fourth prize area Nobel mentioned in his will, it added. So far, 117 people have been recognised for their literary creations by the Academy, of which 16 are women.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Glück, professor of English at Yale University, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that, with austere beauty, makes individual existence universal."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Tuesday awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Benjamin List and David MacMillan for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction: organocatalysis, which has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research, and has made chemistry greener.

Meanwhile, the Physics Nobel has been awarded with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and the other half to Giorgio Parisi for laying the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it, as well as revolutionised the theory of disordered materials and random processes.

The Nobel announcements began on Monday with David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian being recognised for their contribution in the field of medicine for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.