Nobel Prize in Literature won by novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Zanzibar-born novelist, won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
“For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,” the Swedish Academy announced this morning.
The prize money for the award is more than $1 million.
Gurnah was born in the year 1948. Until his retirement, he was a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.
Gurnah has written ten novels, including Paradise, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994. It tells the storey of Yusuf, a young boy whose father has pawned him off to a merchant in order to settle old debts. Gurnah’s writing challenges previous Western perspectives on Africa as Yusuf travels through the continent.
Louise Glück, an American poet, has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy is frequently chastised for focusing too heavily on male, primarily Eurocentric writers. Only 16 women have received the Nobel Prize in Literature in its 120-year history. Toni Morrison was the last Black person to receive the award, in 1993. Gurnah is Africa’s fifth Nobel laureate, following Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee.
According to the Nobel Committee chair, Anders Olsson, the Swedish Academy intends to diversify its laureate candidates beginning next year. In a recent interview with The New Republic, Olsson stated that they intend to have experts in language areas where the committee lacks “deep competence” (primarily, places in Africa and Asia) provide reports, presumably with a list of names to consider.
The awards were postponed in 2018 after Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of a Swedish Academy member, was accused of sexual misconduct and leaking Academy information. Arnault was later convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison.
Other Nobel laureates this week include David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian in medicine for their work on touch and temperature. Benjamin List and David Macmillan won the chemistry prize for their work on building chemicals. And the physics prize was split, with one half going to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their climate change research, and the other half going to Giorgio Parisi for his work examining patterns in materials.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded tomorrow.