The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has described as inhumane the responses of the UK and France to migrants trying to cross the English Channel.
On the day he received his medal, the Tanzanian-born novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, said he didn’t understand why British ministers referred to them as criminals and thieves when some in the government come from immigrant families themselves.
A record 26,000 migrants have crossed the Channel from France to the UK this year. Dozens others have died.
Mr Gurnah, now a British citizen, also expressed some amazement that the UK government had not congratulated him on his Nobel, wondering whether that was because he was an immigrant from Africa.
