Did Gurnah win the literature Nobel for his prose or politics?

Abdulrazak Gurnah. By PalFest – originally posted to Flickr as Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110802879

Researching a piece on the newly minted Nobel literature laureate, I came across a suggestion in The New Republic that a “political dimension to the committee’s thinking” may have tipped the scales in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s favour.

The New Republic noted that much of Mr “Gurnah’s writing focuses on migration and that he came to Britain as a refugee”. It quoted Nobel committee Chair Anders Olsson’s response to a direct question on the politics of the literature prize. Mr Olsson apparently said the prize was not awarded for political reasons and that “the phenomenon of exile and migration has been there for many, many years.” The New Republic added that Mr Olsson claimed the Nobel Prize committee had been following Mr Gurnah’s work since the 1980s. This, according to the publication, was a dead giveaway because Mr “Gurnah only p…