Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize

Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism."

Born in Zanzibar in 1948 and based in England, Gurnah is a professor at the University of Kent.

He wrote 10 novels, including "Paradise," which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.14 million US dollars).

Gurnah was lauded for characters who "find themselves in the gulf between cultures...confronting racism and prejudice, but also compelling themselves to silence the truth or reinventing a biography to avoid conflict with reality."

Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of English and post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in Canterbury, in southeast England.

He initially thought it was a prank.

Gurnah, 72, arrived in Britain as an 18-year-old refugee half a century ago.

He said the themes of migration and displacement explored in his novels are even more urgent now — amid mass movements of people displaced from Syria, Afghanistan and beyond — than when he began his writing career.

"The scale is different," he said.

"What makes it different, I think, is what we see in the way that people risk their lives. Of course, people risked their lives from Haiti coming to the United States a couple of decades ago, and that was horrible."

But in more recent years, the vast numbers of asylum seekers perilously crossing the Mediterranean or the Sahara, he said, are "a different scale of horror".

IMAGE: AP