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Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, BBC reported. 

Announcing him as the winner on Thursday, the Academy praised Gurnah for for his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism". The prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14m / £840,000).

Gurnah, 73, is the author of 10 novels, including Paradise and Desertion.

Paradise, published in 1994, told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and won the Booker Prize, marking his breakthrough as a novelist.

"Abdulrazak Gurnah's dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking," the Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement.

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s.He was Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, until his recent retirement.

Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986.