Search results for ""Author Abdellatif Laâbi""

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020. Winner of an English PEN Award. Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laabi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laabi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from 'beyond the borders of what is human', as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are 'the only weapon we've left'. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is 'right here / inside me / like a second body', and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that 'epic of silence'. These poems, Laabi's 'bitter fruits of the murderous twilight', renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet's duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laabi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laabi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.

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Compelling poems from one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. Imprisoned for many years by the Moroccan authorities, Laabi's poetry is haunted by memories of torture and prisons and bears witness to his preoccupations with-and resistance to-the growing international sickness of state-supported inhumanity. Abdellatif Laabi was born in 1942 in Fez. In 1966, he founded the avant-garde literary and artistic journal Souffles, which helped spark a literary and artistic renaissance through North Africa. Imprisoned for seven years in the '70s for his political beliefs and his writings, he has lived in Paris since 1985. His latest book, a novel, will be published this year by Gallimard.

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