Ahwal al-Ma'rifa: Agencies

The Royal Swedish Academy announced the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Tanzanian writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, residing in Britain.

The granting committee's statement stated that the prize was awarded to him, "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

Writer Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and writes in English. Among his most famous novels is "Paradise," which he wrote in 1994 and reached the shortlists for the Booker and Whitbread prizes, "Desertion" (2005), and "By the Sea" (2001).

Gurnah went to study in Britain in 1968, then worked as a lecturer between 1980-1982 at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria, then moved to the University of Kent, where he obtained his doctorate degree in 1982. He is now a professor and head of graduate studies in the English department at the university. His main academic interest is addressing post-colonial issues and the discourse associated with colonialism, especially regarding Africa, the Caribbean, and India.

His first three novels, "Memory of Departure" (1987), "Pilgrims Way" (1988), and "Dottie" (1990), document the experience of immigrants in contemporary Britain from different points of view. His fourth novel "Paradise" (1994) is set in colonized East Africa during the First World War. His novel "Admiring Silence" (1996) tells the story of a young man who leaves Zanzibar and migrates to Britain, where he marries and becomes a teacher, then his attitude towards himself and his marriage is affected in a return visit to his homeland after 20 years.

Abdulrazak Gurnah lives in Brighton, East Sussex, and in 2007 edited the "Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie."

The value of the prestigious prize is 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.14 million). Between 1901 and 2021, the Nobel Committee awarded 113 prizes in the field of Chemistry.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the fourth prize awarded this week after the scientists Benjamin List from Germany and David MacMillan from Britain won the Chemistry prize, and the Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the Medicine prize for discovering receptors in the skin that sense temperature and touch, and the win of each of the Japanese-born American meteorologist and climatologist Syukuro Manabe, climate model designer Klaus Hasselmann, and Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi for the Physics prize. The announcement of the Literature prize will be followed in the coming days by the Nobel Peace and Economics prizes.

It is noteworthy that four writers from the continent of Africa previously won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, who was the first African to win the prize in 1986, followed by the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, then two from South Africa won it: the writer Nadine ,rdimer in 1991 and the writer John Maxwell Coetzee in 2003.

References:

https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/

https://arabic.rt.com/culture/