“He has written a work that is absolutely unwavering and at the same time compassionate and full of heart for the people of East Africa,” Mengisti said. “He writes stories that are often peaceful stories of people who are not being listened to, but there is a determination to listen.”

Laura Winters, In review in The New York Times 1996, classified heaven From “An Elementary Tale of Shiny and Slanted Maturity,” he added that perilous silence It was a work that “subtly describes the suffering of a man trapped between two cultures, each of which he denies because of his relationship to the other”.

But despite being recognized as “one of Africa’s greatest living writers” according to author Giles Foden, Gerna’s books have rarely received the kind of commercial welcome that some previous winners have had.

Lola Shonyen, director of the Aki Arts and Writers Festival in Nigeria, said she hopes the Nobel Prize will attract a larger audience to the Horn of Africa, where her work is not widely known. He also hoped that his historical novels would inspire younger generations to think more deeply about their countries’ past.

“If we don’t actively and deliberately watch what happened in the past, how can we build a successful future for ourselves on the continent?” he said.

Jarna was born in Zanzibar, which is now part of Tanzania, in 1948. After arriving in England, she started writing novels at the age of twenty. finished his first novel, departure memory About a young man fleeing a failed uprising while writing his doctoral thesis. He became Professor of English and Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he taught the works of writers such as Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o y Salman Rushdie.

In both her academic and her novelistic work, Jarna has attempted to discover “the way colonialism changed everything in the world, and the people who live it still deal with this experience and some of its wounds.”