The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah "for his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents," explains the Stockholm Academy.
Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, but moved to England as a refugee in the late 1960s.
After the end of British colonial rule in December 1963, Zanzibar experienced a bloody revolution which, under the regime of President Abeid Karume, led to the oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin.
Ethnic group of which Gurnah belonged, who after school was forced to leave his family and flee the country, then the newly formed Republic of Tanzania. He was eighteen, three years later he started writing. Although Swahili was his first language, he soon chose English as his literary language. Only in 1984 did he manage to return to Zanzibar.
Gurnah is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He wrote ten novels and several short stories. In Italy Garzanti has published “Il paradiso” (1994), selected for the Booker Prize, “Sulla riva del mare” (2001) and “Il desertore” (2005).
(Unioneonline / D)