Nobel Prize for Literature 2021: Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded 2021 literature prize

Oct 7, 2021, 16:46 IST

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually to an author from any country who has produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction in the field of literature.

Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded 2021 literature prize
Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded 2021 literature prize

Nobel Prize for Literature 2021: Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.

About Abdulrazak Gurnah 

•Literature Prize laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar. He came to in England as a refugee in 1960’s and served as Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

•He has published 10 novels and a number of short stories and his 4th novel ‘Paradise’, which was published in 1994 turned out to be his breakthrough as a writer. The novel is a coming of age account and a sad love story in which different worlds and belief systems collide.

•His work has largely been around refugee’s disruption, focusing on identity and self-image. He has consciously broken convention with his blunt writing. 

•His novels break away from stereotype and are a pathway to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.

•He had started writing  in English exile when he was 21 years old. His works are in English even though Swahili was his first language.

Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually to an author from any country who has produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction in the field of literature.

The award is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 113 times to 117 Nobel Prize laureates.

The Nobel Prize has honoured several poets, novelists and songwriters in the past including William Butler Yeats, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bob Dylan. 

Indian Literature Prize winner

Rabindranath Tagore is the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful poetry. He was also the first non-European literature laureate.

Toni Morrison first African American woman to win Nobel Prize

Toni Morrison had become the first African American woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize when she won the 1993 literature prize.  She was one of the most powerful and distinguished storytellers of the time.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2020 winner

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Gluck for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.

Read More: Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 awarded to American poet Louise Gluck

Nobel Prize for Literature Winners List- 2000-2020

2020- Louise Gluck

2019- Peter Handke

2018- Olga Tokarczuk

2017- Kazuo Ishiguro 

2016 - Bob Dylan 

2015 - Svetlana Alexievich 

2014 - Patrick Modiano 

2013 - Alice Munro 

2012 - Mo Yan 

2011 - Tomas Tranströmer

2010 - Mario Vargas Llosa 

2009 - Herta Müller

2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio 

2007 - Doris Lessing 

2006 - Orhan Pamuk 

2005 - Harold Pinter

2004 - Elfriede Jelinek

2003 - John M. Coetzee

2002 - Imre Kertész 

2001 - Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul 

2000 - Gao Xingjian

Sangeeta Nair is a news professional with 6+ years of experience in news, education, lifestyle, research and videos. She has a bachelors in History and Master in Mass Communication. At jagranjosh.com, she writes on Current Affairs. She can be reached at sangeeta.nair@jagrannewmedia.com.
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