Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for literature about colonialism and refugee lives.
Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and moved to Britain as a young man in the 1960s. The Swedish Academy recognized his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
His novels include Paradise, By the Sea, and Desertion. They explore East African history, displacement, migration, memory, cultural estrangement, and the legacies of European imperialism. Although English became his principal literary language, his work draws deeply on the history and cultures of the Swahili coast.
Gurnah is sometimes confused with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a prominent Kenyan novelist who has not won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gurnah’s award also followed the 2020 Nobel for Louise Glück and preceded the 2022 award for Annie Ernaux.