“The phone rang while I was making coffee,” Gurna said in an interview with the Nobel Prize in Literature on the same day.
In other words, it was mistaken for an advertisement “spam call,” and he almost never received a call announcing the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Fortunately, he continued the call after persuading the other party not to hang up, and he said that he received the honorable news firsthand.
Gurna is the fifth African-born Nobel laureate in literature. Wallet Soyinka, Nagib Mapuz, Nadine Gordimer, and John Maxwell Kutze were previously African-born recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is the first time in 35 years that a black writer has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy revealed the reason for selecting Gurna as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature on the same day, saying that “the background of the award was based on a firm and compassionate insight into colonialism.”
Born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, which was a British colony at the time, in 1948, Gurna went to study in the UK at the age of 18, and has been working in the UK to this day.
Gurna’s novel ‘Paradise’, published in 1994 and set in East Africa, was nominated for the British Booker Prize, one of the world’s top three literary awards, and is considered his representative work.
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