Another African writer has won the Nobel prize for literature.
He is Tanxanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who, according to the Swedish Academy, won it for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Phenomenal.com.ng had, on Wednesday, previewed the announcement of this year’s winner, spotlighting the qualifications of three leading Nigerian writers – with the belief that they are suitable candidates.
These are Niyi Osundare, Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie and Femi Osofisan.
As ‘The Gurdian’ reports, Gurnah, who grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar and arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Tanzanian writer’s novels, from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, the “magnificent”, Afterlives, “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.
No black African writer has won the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Gurnah is the first Tanzanian writer to win.
Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Olsson said that it “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness”, but is also a coming of age tale, and a sad love story.
