U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work explores the legacies of imperialism on uprooted individuals, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah moved to Britain as a teenage refugee after an uprising on the Indian Ocean island in 1968.
Recently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent, he is the author of 10 novels, including “Paradise,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, “By the Sea” and “Desertion.”