Tanzanian novelist/writer Abdulrazak Gurnah has secured the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, the award-giving body announced. The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor, ie in USD 1.14 million.

The prominent prize was awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy, which cited Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Born in Zanzibar and based in England, Gurnah currently retired as a professor of post-colonial literature at the University of Kent. Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. He is best known for his 1994 novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa during World War first, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Gurnah would have generally received the Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament, according to reports

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