The writer Abdulrazak Gurnah is the first black writer since 1993 to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced on Thursday.
Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar and has written 10 novels, was recognized by Nobel Prize judges and provided compassionate glimpses into the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the divide between cultures and continents.
Gurnah will receive $1 million in prize cash for the award. The creator previously labored on the University of Kent in England, wherein he taught English and postcolonial literature.
“I assume it’s simply top notch and notable,” Gurnah instructed Reuters whilst requested how he felt to win the prize. “I am very thankful to the Swedish Academy for nominating me and my work. It’s simply great— it’s only a large prize, and any such big listing of notable writers—I am nevertheless taking it in. It turned into any such whole wonder that I clearly needed to wait till I heard it introduced earlier than I ought to consider it.”
Gurnah’s win can also additionally sign the start of alternate for the Nobel Prize, which has regularly been criticized for deciding on male, Eurocentric writers. According to NPR, withinside the Nobel Prize’s 120-yr history, only approximately sixteen ladies have ever gained the prize in literature.
Gurnah is the fourth African-born creator to win the Nobel Prize, becoming a member of Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee.
The most recent Black individual to win the award turned into Toni Morrison, who wrote Beloved and Tar Baby. The Academy’s Nobel Committee Chair, Anders Olsson, instructed The New Republic in a latest interview they’ll start to boom the variety in their candidates, including the Academy plans on having specialists in language regions the committee doesn’t have a “deep competence” in.
“It turned into very Eurocentric within the first a part of the 20th century, and only a few ladies gained, as you say,” Olsson said. “But now, in latest times, I assume there was a substantial shift. In the closing 20 years, seven ladies have acquired the prize. We are at the circulate forward, withinside the proper direction.”
The prize additionally experienced some substantial controversy in 2018 after an Academy member’s husband, Jean-Claude Arnault, turned a terrible trick. He was eventually accused of sexual misconduct and leaking information, records, reviews, and other sensitive material related to the prize. He could later be sentenced to 2 years in jail for rape.
Other Nobel Prize winners encompass David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian (medicine), Benjamin List and David Macmillan (Chemistry), and Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann cut up the prize for physics. The Nobel Peace Prize may be introduced in subsequent weeks.