literature
Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah honored
Abdulrazak Gurnah with the Medal of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 after a ceremony in London. Photo: Matt Dunham / AP / dpa
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The ceremonial honors for the Nobel Prize winners actually take place in Stockholm in December. This year, almost everything is different due to the corona.
This year’s Tanzanian Nobel Prize for Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, was officially honored in London. Gurnah received a granite medal and Nobel Prize certificate from the Swedish ambassador Mikaela Kumlin on Monday afternoon, as the responsible committee subsequently confirmed.
In view of the pandemic, almost all award winners will receive their awards this year in their home countries instead of the usual Stockholm. Only the Nobel Peace Prize laureates, who are traditionally the only ones to be honored in Oslo, are expected to attend the ceremony in the Norwegian capital again this year.
The author Gurnah, born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, receives the award “for his uncompromising and compassionate understanding of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents,” as the Swedish Academy announced in October.
Gurnah came to Great Britain as a refugee in the late 1960s and has lived there ever since. According to the Swedish Academy, he has published ten novels, as well as a number of short stories.