At 13:00 local time on October 7, 2021 in Stockholm, Sweden (19:00 Beijing time), the Swedish Academy awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for literature to the Tanzanian writer abdulrazak gurnah. The award speech was: “in view of his uncompromising and compassionate insight into the impact of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gap between culture and the mainland.”
Gulna (born in Zanzibar in 1948), 73 years old, is a Tanzanian novelist. He writes in English and now lives in Britain. His most famous novel is paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker award and the Whitbread award, while abandonment (2005) and the seaside (2001) were shortlisted for the Booker award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Have you ever read his books or words? The official website of the Nobel Prize released a questionnaire. As of press time, 95% of people said they “haven’t read it”.
Gulna was born in Zanzibar Island on the coast of East Africa and went to England to study in 1968. From 1980 to 1982, gulna taught at bayero University in Kano, Nigeria. Then he went to the University of Kent and received his doctorate in 1982. He is now a professor and graduate director of the English department. His main academic interests are postcolonial writing and discussions related to colonialism, especially those related to Africa, the Caribbean and India.
He edited two volumes of essays on African writing and published many articles on contemporary postcolonial writers, including v. S。 Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, etc. He is the editor of the Cambridge company to Rushdie (2007). He has been a contributing editor of wasafiri magazine since 1987.
According to the official tweet of the Nobel Prize, abdullahzak gulna has published ten novels and many short stories, and the theme of “refugee chaos” runs through his works. He began writing when he came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 21. Although Swahili is his first language, English is still his main writing language. Gulner’s persistence in truth and his opposition to simplified thinking are admirable. His novels abandon the rigid description and let us see the multicultural East Africa that people in many other parts of the world are not familiar with.
In gulna’s literary world, everything is changing – memory, name, identity. All his books show an endless exploration driven by the desire for knowledge, which is also prominent in the book afterlife (2020). This exploration has never changed since he began writing at the age of 21.
Post time: Oct-09-2021