
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 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.
For his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.