Writer Abdulrazak Gurnah has become the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in nearly 20 years. The Tanzania-born novelist was awarded the prize Thursday for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents,” the Swedish Academy announced in a statement. Gurnah, born in 1948 in Zanzibar, lives in the United Kingdom, where he taught English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, until he retired recently. He has 10 novels under his belt, including By the Sea and Desertion. “Gurnah’s dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world,” the Academy said of his work.