Tanzania's Gurnah, novelist of colonialism and refuge, wins 2021 Nobel

FILE PHOTO: An outside view of the Norwegian Nobel Institute with a bust of Alfred Nobel, in central Oslo, Norway September 14, 2021. REUTERS/Nora Buli

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, 72, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee," the award-giving body said on Thursday.

Based in Britain, Gurnah is the first African writer to win the award since the Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007, and only the second writer of colour from sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won in 1986.