Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work touches on colonialism and refugee life, on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize, the Swedish Academy said.

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but came to England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, was honoured “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 said.

Gurnah has published 10 novels and a number of short stories.

He is best known for his 1994 novel “Paradise”, set in colonial East Africa during the First World War, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.