New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)
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12. Land of the Leader, the Leader’s Land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ibrahim al-Koni, who was born in 1948, is a Tuareg whose mother tongue is Tamasheq. He immigrated to Switzerland in 1993 and currently resides in Spain.
Winner of the 2005 Mohamed Zafzaf Award for the Arabic Novel and the 2008 Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature, al-Koni has also received a Libyan state prize for literature and art, prizes in Switzerland including the literary prize of the Canton of Bern, and a prize from the Franco-Arab Friendship Committee in 2002 for L’Oasis cachée. In 2010 he was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for the Arabic Novel, and in 2011 Georgetown University organized a special conference devoted entirely to al-Koni’s works.
Al-Koni spent his childhood in the Sahara Desert. Then, after working for the Libyan newspapers Fazzan and al-Thawra, he studied comparative literature at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he also worked as a journalist. He later lived in Warsaw for nine years and edited the Polish-language periodical as-Sadaqa, which published translations of short stories from Arabic, including some of his own. His novels The Bleeding of the Stone, Gold Dust, Anubis, The Seven Veils of Seth, and The Puppet have been published in English translation. At least seven of his titles have appeared in French, and at least ten exist in German translation. Representative works by al-Koni are available in approximately thirty-five languages, including Japanese.