Top German culture prize goes to Algeria's Boualem Sansal

Jun 9, 2011

Berlin - Boualem Sansal, a 61-year-old former Algerian government official who began writing novels against repression in 1999, was picked Thursday as the winner of a top culture award, the German Book Trade Peace Prize.

The award was also intended to encourage the pro-democracy movement in North Africa, said Gottfried Honnefelder, chairman of the booksellers' and publishers' association Boersenverein in Frankfurt.

'This comes just at the right time,' Sansal said in an interview published by the Boersenverein's news website.

'People in the Arab world are fighting for their freedom right now, and peace for them is freedom,' said Sansal, who accused the West of failing to help Algeria's protesters. 'Nobody helps us,' he added in the interview.

'They think people of the south, the Arabs and black Africans, are not ready for liberty,' he said. Sansal said support from the European Union and the United Nations was vital to protect Arab liberties won by the protesters.

The annual award, worth 25,000 euros (36,500 dollars) is to be handed over to him in October during the Frankfurt Book Fair with cabinet ministers, top executives and star authors present.

Sansal had won the prize for the 'wit and empathy with which he encourages respect and mutual understanding between cultures,' the judges said. He was one of the few intellectuals openly criticizing the government to still live in Algeria, they added.

The author was formerly a senior government economist.

The Curse of the Barbarians, his first novel, published in France in 1999 and in German translation in 2003, mocked repression. A later novel, The German Mujahid, has appeared in English.

His ministry suspended and later sacked him, but Sansal insisted on remaining in Algeria, which has an authoritarian, military-backed government that has forcibly dispersed pro-democracy rallies this year.

The prize goes every year to a writer, scholar or artist regarded as encouraging world understanding. Last year's winner was David Grossman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust.

Source: Monsters and Critics.
Link: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1644572.php/Top-German-culture-prize-goes-to-Algeria-s-Boualem-Sansal.