Two Nobel Prize winners did not believe their happiness: they decided that they were being played

The two Nobel laureates didn’t believe they were receiving a call from the prize committee. They considered the calls to be spam. TJournal.

Photo: Shutterstock

The editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta simply did not answer the call, and the writer Abdulrazak Gurn had to be persuaded not to hang up.

On October 7 and 8, the Nobel Prize winners were announced in two categories: literature and peace. The winners said they did not expect such decisions from the committee - they considered the calls from Norway to be spam.

Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurna told the BBC that when he received a phone call to congratulate him on receiving the Literature Prize, he did not believe it.

He was brewing tea and said to the caller from the Nobel Committee: “Come on, leave me alone! Leave me alone". According to Gourn, he considered the challenge to be a publicity or some kind of practical joke. He was persuaded with difficulty not to hang up.

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The editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, also decided that the call from Norway was spam. He did not expect so much that he could become a laureate of the award that he did not even pick up the phone and just dropped the call.

"I am laughing. I didn't expect it at all. It's crazy here. I saw a call from Norway, but I considered it an unwanted call,” says Dmitry Muratov.

A writer from Tanzania, living in Great Britain for many years, 73-year-old professor, specialist in colonial literature Abdulrazak Gurna was born in Zanzibar, a former British colony, which in 1964 became part of independent Tanzania. «Medusa».

After completing his education and defending his dissertation at the University of Kent in the UK, Gourna briefly returned to Africa to teach at a university in Nigeria, and then got a position at his English alma mater, where he has been working for the past forty years.

His writing interests, as you might guess, also lie in the sphere of the colonial past of the African continent: the most famous novels by Gurna "Paradise" and "Afterlife" describe the German rule in East Africa, much more brutal than the British, and at the same time much worse reflected in literature ...

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Abdulrazak Gurn was awarded for "his uncompromising and compassionate immersion in the subject of the consequences of colonialism and its impact on the fate of refugees on the way between cultures and continents."

Dmitry Muratov is a Russian journalist and TV presenter.

Editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta (1995-2017 and since 2019), one of its founders.

Dmitry Muratov, together with Filipino journalist Maria Resse, received the award “for efforts to defend freedom of expression, which is a prerequisite for democracy and lasting peace”.

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