STOCKHOLM — U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose experience of crossing continents and cultures has nurtured his novels about the impact of migration on individuals and societies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.”
Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of English and post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in Canterbury, in southeast England — and initially thought it was a prank.
“You think it can’t be true,” he told The Associated Press. “It literally took my breath away.”
Gurnah, 72, arrived in Britain as an 18-year-old refugee a half-century ago. He said the themes of migration and displacement explored in his novels are even more urgent now — amid mass movements of people displaced from Syria, Afghanistan and beyond — than when he began his writing career.
“The scale is different,” he said. “What makes it different, I think, is what we see in the way that people risk their lives. Of course, people risked their lives from Haiti coming to the United States a couple of decades ago, and that was horrible.”
But in more recent years, the vast numbers of asylum seekers perilously crossing the Mediterranean or the Sahara, he said, are “a different scale of horror.
He said he hoped fiction could help people in wealthy nations understand the humanity of the migrants they see on their screens.
“What fiction can do is it can fill in the gaps,” he said. “And actually allow people to see that, in fact, they are complicated stories which are being mashed up by the high-sounding lies and distortions that seem to be what popular culture somehow requires to continue to ignore and to dismiss what they don’t want to hear.”