According to RIA Novosti with reference to the statement of the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Gurna was awarded for "an uncompromising and compassionate study of the consequences of colonialism and the fate of a refugee in the chasm between cultures and continents".
According to the BBC, Gourna lives in Britain and writes in English in the genre of realism. Among his most famous novels are Paradise (1994) and Desertion (2005). His latest work, Gravel Heart, came out in 2017. The last time writers from Africa were awarded was in 1986 (then the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Wole Shoyinka from Nigeria).
Among the favorites this year were French writers Annie Erno and Maryse Condé.
According to Forbes, Abdulrazak Gurna was born in 1948 in Zanzibar. At that time, the island was under British control, now it is part of Tanzania. In 1968, as a student, Gourn moved to the UK, earned his doctorate at the University of Kent and is now heading the graduate school there in the Department of English. Gourna is the author of ten books, the most famous of which are "Paradise" (1994) and "By the Sea" (2001), included in the lists of the Booker Prize.
In literature, Gurna made his debut in 1987 with the novel "Memory of Departure". In addition to novels, Gurna is the author of studies on contemporary postcolonial writers.
The announcement of the names of this year's Nobel laureates began on October 4. The prizes are awarded annually for outstanding achievements in the fields of medicine and physiology, physics, chemistry, literature, economics and peacekeeping.
In addition to worldwide fame, the winners receive a diploma, a gold medal and a cash prize of SEK 10 million (approximately $ 1.2 million).
The prize is awarded annually by the will of the Swedish businessman, dynamite creator Alfred Nobel.
Over the years, Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway became laureates of the prestigious award. In 2015, the prize was awarded to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich. The laureates of 2016–2019 were Peter Handke (Austria), Olga Tokarchuk (Poland), Kazuo Ishiguro (Great Britain), Bob Dylan (USA).
In 2018, the Nobel Prize in Literature was decided not to be awarded due to accusations of harassment brought against the husband of one of the Academy members. In 2019, the Swedish Academy, with a new composition and updated rules, also awarded the prize for the previous year.
In 2020, the poet from the United States, Louise Gluck, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy noted her "unmistakable poetic voice, which, with its austere beauty, makes individual existence universal".