Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian novelist, who writes in English and is based in the United Kingdom. The most famous of his novels are Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize, Desertion (2005), and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."