Home » Entertainment » He writes about colonialism. Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania won the Nobel Prize for Literature

He writes about colonialism. Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Seventy-three-year-old Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania in East Africa received the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. The Swedish academy praised him for “uncompromisingly and compassionately penetrating the consequences of colonialism and the fate of refugees torn between different cultures and continents.”

Gurnah became the first African black writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1986, when he was awarded Wole Soyinka from Nigeria.

A native of Zanzibar, whose mother tongue is Swahili, he left for Britain as a student in 1968. Today he writes in English and lives in Brighton. From the early 1980s, he lectured for two years at Bayer University in Kano, Nigeria, then moved back to Britain to the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he received his doctorate. He taught English literature at the same school since 1985 and headed the postgraduate department. In addition, he worked as the editor of the British literary magazine Wasafiri. He is interested in postcolonial fiction and its relationship to the history of Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has published two parts of essays on African prose.

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