The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah，for his concern for refugees（难民）between cultures and continents. Gurnah，72，is the first black writer to receive the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993，and some observers saw his selection as a corrective after years of European and American Nobel winners. 

Growing up in Zanzibar，Abdulrazak Gurnah never considered the possibility that he might one day be a writer. "It never occurred to me，" he said in an interview. Then，in 1964，a violent protest forced Gurnah，when he was 18，to escape to England. Poor and homesick，he began to write something about home in his diary，then longer passages，then stories about other people. Those reflections，the habit of writing to understand and document his own lives，eventually gave rise to his first novel，then nine more. They include Memory of Departure，Pilgrims Way and Dottie ， which all deal with the immigrant experience in Britain；Paradise shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994，about a boy in an East African country hurt by colonialism；and Admiring Silence，about a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England，where he marries and becomes a teacher.

The news of Gurnah's Nobel was celebrated by fellow novelists and academics who have long argued that his work deserves a wider audience. His longtime editor，Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury，said Gurnah's win was "most deserved "for a writer. "He is one of the greatest living African writers，and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it's just killed me. I posted a video on the social network last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that had been just ignored. And now this has happened，"she said.