STOCKHOLM: Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize for his writings on post-colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience.

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

The Swedish Academy said Gurnah 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."

US scientists win Nobel for unlocking mystery of sensing temperature, touch

"His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world," the Nobel Foundation added.

Gurnah told the Nobel Prize website he was stunned to get the call from the Swedish Academy.

"I thought it was a prank," he said. "These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand... so it was not something that was in my mind," he said.