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France
Afghan author wins top book prize
Article published on the 2008-11-10 Latest update 2008-11-10 14:33 TU
Atiq Rahimi
(Photo: Reuters)
Atiq Rahimi was awarded the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s top literary prizes, on Monday for his novel Syngué sabour. Pierre de patience (Stone of patience). The 46-year-old author is best known for his 2002 book Earth and Ashes, which he also directed as a film.
The jury, the ten permanent members of the Goncourt Academie, voted seven to three in the second round to award the prize to Rahimi. The runner up was Michel Le Bris’ La beaute du monde (The beauty of the world).
Syngué sabour is Rahimi’s third book and the first written directly in French; his others were written in Persian.
It is a first-person confession of an Afghan woman who seeks to free herself from marital and religious oppression as she watches over her husband who is in a coma after being shot in the neck. The title refers to a tradition of confiding in a magic stone.
Rahimi was born in Kabul in 1962 and fled the country in the mid 1980s. He went first to Pakistan, then to France where he was granted political asylum. He studied film at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Another, equally prestigious literary prize, the Renaudot, was awarded to the Guinean author Tierno Monénembo for his book Le roi de Kahel (The king of Kahel), after 11 rounds of voting.
The book is set in West Africa at the end of the 19th century, setting the scene for the colonisation of the region by recounting the epic story of Olivier de Sanderval who tries to build a kingdom by gaining the trust of local chiefs.
Monénembo, 61, is the author of a dozen novels, including his 1979 Les crapauds-brousse (The bush toads) and his 2004 Peuls, the French word for the Fulani tribes of western Africa. He often writes about the inability of African intellectuals to address the problems of Africans living in France.
Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel was in the shortlist for the prize for his book Le Cas Sonderberg (The Sonderberg case).
