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The
2004 Award
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This
Blinding Absence of Light
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition:
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| An
immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding
Absence of Light is the latest work by Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first
North African winner of the 1994 Prix Mahgreb. Ben Jelloun crafts a horrific
real-life narrative into fiction to tell the appalling story of the desert
concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political
enemies under the most harrowing conditions. Not until September 1991, under
international pressure, was Hassan's regime forced to open these desert
hellholes. A handful of survivors - living cadavers who had shrunk by over
a foot in height - emerged from the six-by-three-foot cells in which they
had been held underground for decades. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun eschewed the traditional novel format and wrote the book in the simplest of language, reaching always for the most basic of words, the most correct descriptions. The result is a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Winner of the 1994 Prix Maghreb, Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Répubblica, El País, and Panorama. His novels include The Sacred Night, which received the Prix Goncourt in 1987, and Corruption. |
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