Immigrants continue to be at the receiving end of cruelty: Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah

Jaipur, Jan 21 He says while there has been a change in how people talk about migrants, what remains unchanged is the kind of panic the issue creates and the way the media presents it.

"As if they are swamping and targetting the native population," says the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Criticising the utterances of ministers of the UK government, ironically many of whose members, including the Prime Minister are of Indian descent, this Tanzanian-British novelist says it is shocking how anyone could speak in such a cruel way. Priti Patel, who served as the Home Secretary from 2019 to 2022, had floated a controversial plan to push back refugees crossing the Channel in boats.

"One wonders how anyone can talk in such a monster-like way," says this second black African to win the award whose works explore the refugee experience, and who moved to the UK in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution.

Talking about receiving the Nobel Prize, the author, who is attending the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival being organised by Teamwork Arts, says that he is happy to find himself in the company of writers whose works he greatly admires.

Remembering that as a student, while studying Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', the book cited that he was a Nobel awardee, Gurnah, the author of 'Paradise'