Abdulrazak Gurnah, a popular Tanzanian novelist, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, said he was making tea when he got the call. He thought it was a cold call and somebody was pranking him. 

After winning the prestigious award, in a telephonic interview with the Nobel Prize team, as per Reuters, said, “Well I’m still taking it in. I suppose it is inevitable. It is such a big prize… Yes, it is inevitable.”

He added that he came to know that he won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature when he received a call from the Nobel Prize office.

“I thought it was a prank. Because these things are usually floated for weeks or sometimes even months beforehand about who are the runners for the award,” Gurnah said.

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Gurnah is the only Black African author to win the Nobel Prize after Wole Soyinka, who won it in 1986.

The Nobel Prize Academy said that the award was in recognition of his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

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A Canterbury resident, Gurnah is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) The Last Gift and Gravel Heart.

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He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He is also the associate editor of the journal ‘Wasafiri’.

Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, Gurnah came to the UK  as a student in 1968.