The Booker Prize's reaction to Gurnah's Nobel Prize in Literature
Gaby Wood, Director of the Booker Prize Foundation on the news that Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of nine novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2021. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, and was a Booker Prize judge in 2016.
His novels include Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), The Last Gift and Gravel Heart.
- Prizes judged
- The Booker Prize 2016
For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.
Nobel Prize announcement
2021 Shortlisted author Nadifa Mohamed celebrates
No way!!!! Oh my god. This is amazing. Abdulrazak helped me become a writer - me reading him, him reading my scrappy early work - all those years ago. https://t.co/qFkdvHOiJb
— Nadifa Mohamed (@thesailorsgirl) October 7, 2021
All nominated books
An African boy comes of age in an East Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence, in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s powerful historical fiction.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s story of love and betrayal, of seduction and possession, and of people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom.
