Born in Zanzibar and arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s, he won for his work on the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees
Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2021. By giving him recognition, theStockholm Academy once again he snubs the big favorites and makes a choice, in some way political.
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Then in Zanzibar in Tanzania in 1948, who arrived in Britain as a student in 1968 (teaches literature at the University of Kent), Gurnah began writing in English at 21, although Swahili was his first language. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, from Shakespeare to VS Naipaul, has in fact marked his work in a particular way. As a scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah devoted himself to research on postcolonial fiction, especially regarding Africa, the Caribbean and India and published articles on several contemporary postcolonial writers, including VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zo Wicomb
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Author of ten novels and several short stories, Gurnah little unknown in Italy, where Garzanti published years ago his novels pi noti: Heaven
set in colonial East Africa during World War I (1994) and selected for the Booker Prize, The deserter (2005) e On the seashore (2001) with an elderly asylum seeker living in an English seaside town.
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The motivation of the Academy mentions his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents. Gurnah in his works reflects on the effects of war and what remains of colonialism.
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The migration and moving fromEast Africa in Europe or within Africa, they are in fact at the center of all novels. With his characters poised between a new life and a past of which they keep vivid memory, constantly constructing a new identity to adapt to their new environments, Gurnah anticipated that literature of migration and multiculturalism, now widely practiced by younger contemporary writers. .
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October 7, 2021 (change October 7, 2021 | 14:20)
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