At this point, controversies should not be a surprise when it comes to the Nobel prizes, especially not for literature.

Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has just been announced as the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

For the first time in almost 70 years there will be no Nobel Literature Prize this year, after the Swedish Academy that selects the