Nobel Laureate in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah receives this Monday the most prestigious literary prizes for his stories on immigration and colonization, during a ceremony in the United Kingdom where the novelist born in Zanzibar has lived in exile for more than a half-century.
Pandemic obliges, the Nobel in science and literature are given, without the usual pomp, in the countries of the laureates for the second consecutive year.
In London, Abdulrazak Gurnah will receive his medal and diploma at midday by the Swedish Ambassador at his official residence.
The prize is endowed with ten million Swedish kronor (almost 1 million euros).
Abdulrazak Gurnah, 72, is the first author of African descent to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature since South African JM Coetzee in 2003. He has been consecrated for his accounts of colonial and post-colonial times in Africa. the East and the torments of refugees trapped between two worlds.
Read alsoNobel Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah condemns a "lack of compassion" towards migrants
The jury praised his
“empathetic and uncompromising account of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents”
.
He also praised his "attachment to the truth and his aversion to simplification."
Born in 1948 in Zanzibar - an archipelago off the coast of East Africa that is now part of Tanzania, Abdulrazak Gurnah fled to England in the late 1960s, a few years after the independence of this former British protectorate, at a time when the Arab community was being persecuted.
He began writing at the age of 21 in the United Kingdom, where he acquired his nationality, inspired by his memories and his immigrant experience.
“I want to write about human interactions, what people go through when they rebuild their lives,”
he said at a press conference, the day after his consecration in early October.
In a column given to the British daily
The Guardian
in 2004, he explained that he
"fell"
into writing, without having foreseen it.
And he didn't see the supreme reward coming:
"You write the best you can, and you hope it works!"
A little-known author before the Nobel, the writer has published ten novels, three of which have been translated into French (
Paradis
,
Près de la Mer
and
Adieu Zanzibar
), as well as several short stories.
He writes in English even though his original language is primarily Swahili.
He now lives in Brighton, in the south-east of England, and taught literature at the University of Kent until his retirement.
Nobel Prize or not, the novelist assured that he would continue to speak frankly about the questions which shaped his work and his vision of the world.
“It's my way of speaking
,” he said.
I don't play a role, I say what I think ”.
He thus castigates the hard line of European governments on immigration from Africa and the Middle East, considering it cruel and illogical.
His latest book,
Afterlives
, follows a little boy stolen from his parents by German colonial troops and who returns to his village to find his missing parents and sister.
2021 has been a boom year for African literature, with three major prizes - the Nobel, the Booker Prize and the Goncourt - won by African writers.
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