Exciting news on Thursday as the Swedish Academy names Retired Professor Emeritus of Post-colonial Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2021. He is the sixth African to achieve this feat and definitely not the last. The author of ten novels is from the Island of Zanzibar of Tanzania. Born in 1948, Gurnah fled to England in 1960 during the civil crisis the new Republic of Tanzania was faced with. He stayed in exile for 24 years and only returned in 1984, shortly before his father passed on. Three years later, he published his debut novel, Memory of Departure (1987) which touches on issues like post colonialism, exile and alienation. He was 39. He went ahead to write nine other books listed below in no particular order:

Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), Afterlives (2020).

The latest novel is described as “compelling,” and unassuming in the use of simple language that is yet vague, by Ethiopian novelist, Maaza Mengiste, in her 2020 review of the novel for The Guardian. Her observations are confirmed by Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, on Thursday when he described Gurnah’s language as a “dedication to truth” and an aversion to “simplification,” and notes it as “striking.” Olsson acknowledged Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Gurnah began writing Afterlives at age 21.

Gurnah is reputed for “decentering European history,” as Mengiste puts it. He opens yet another rested dust of of colonialism and it’s effects on generations after. These concerns are the main preoccupation of his novel and his career at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He taught on writers like Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Salman Rushdie. The 78-year-old, who resides in England, writes in English and mentioned that Shakespeare is one of the major influences of his early writings in English. His native language is Swahili. Gurnah, fled Tanzania at age 18 when the Arab ethnics, which he belonged to, suffered mindless oppression. The prestigious award worth 10,000,000 Swedish crowns = £840,000, was won by Louise Gluck last year. Gurnah is the sixth African to receive the award; Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka in 1986, Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer in 1991, South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee in 2003, and Zimbabwe’s Doris Lessing in 2007. Other notable winners are Ernest Hemingway in 1954, Pablo Neruda in 1971, and Eugene O’Neill in 1936.