Nobel Prizes increasingly attentive to the complexity of contemporary crises: the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to those who write stories of refugees and colonialism

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the new Nobel laureate in literature. The Swedish Academy chose the writer who was born on the island of Zanzibar (Tanzania) in the Indian Ocean in 1948 and arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s.  The theme of refugees recurs in all his works: ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking’, the Swedish Academy motivated. “His novels are far from stereotypical descriptions and open our eyes to a culturally diverse East Africa that is little known in many parts of the world.”

The motivations highlight ‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gap between cultures and continents’.