Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the prestigious award of Nobel Prize in Literature 2021.

Gurnah was born in the Island of Zanzibar in 1948 and at one time lived in the United Kingdom and another in Nigeria.

He becomes the 5th African to win the prestigious literature award.

Other Africans who have bagged the Nobel Prize in literature are Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt in 1988; and the South African winners Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and John Maxwell Coetzee in 2003.

Gurnah’s work that he has done so far in literature includes Memory of Departure (1987) Pilgrims Way (1988) Dottie (1990) Paradise (1994) Admiring Silence (1996) By the Sea (2001) Desertion (2005) the Last Gift (2011) Gravel Heart (2017) Afterlives (2020).