Palestinian author Nasser Abu Srour, launched after 32 years in jail, wins Arab literature prize | EUROtoday
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
Cn the night of November 18, 2025, Nasser Abou Srour despatched a video to the Institute of the Arab World in Paris the place he was awarded the Grand Prix for Arab Literature, awarded every year, for his story, “I am my freedom” (Gallimard). The 56-year-old writer, who turned a author in jail, left the Israeli jails a month in the past the place he had been incarcerated for 32 years.
Born in 1969 in a refugee camp, he was sentenced to life in jail in 1993 for complicity within the assassination of an Israeli intelligence officer. The younger Nasser Abou Srour who learn poets, like these of the era of the primary intifada – “a poem was only good if it led to a demonstration” – he wrote didn’t know that the phrases of the Turkish Nazim Hikhmet on the jail could be so valuable to him.
To learn “I am my freedom” is to learn the current historical past of his folks retraced with the lucidity of the space imposed on them by confinement: his childhood, his youth within the hope of residing elsewhere than in a camp, and subsequently, all of the levels of the battle, with its guarantees, the Oslo accords, and its disillusions, what he calls “the tragedy of division, which increasingly tore the Palestinian story apart. This conflict between two discourses, one nationalist, the other Islamic (…).”
An awesome jail story, with the unique title “Story of a Wall”
This extraordinary jail story, translated for Gallimard by Stéphanie Dujols, who obtained a particular point out for this work of literary transmission, had the unique title “Histoire d’un mur”. It is a really nice e-book on what stays to a human being when he solely has this wall as “other”. And as for the longer term, nothing. “Farewell world” then writes the prisoner whose confessions (what confessions, tragic pages) sounded the sentence.
This remarkably written textual content is all of the extra poignant as a result of it incorporates a rare love story, that of the prisoner together with his lawyer, Nanna, a younger Palestinian returning to the nation, who will put all her coronary heart into defending him, and never solely that, since their love is written from letter to letter and from go to to go to till the inevitable occurs. There are tears that generally you’ll be able to’t maintain again whereas studying, and those who stream right here aren’t Palestinian however common.
Supported by his readings, together with that of Kierkegaard, Nasser Abou Srour lives connected to this wall and to this sentence from the eighth century mystical thinker Imam Ja’afar al-Sadiq who wrote: “A free man is free in all circumstances”.
These pages handed by way of the jail partitions, reaching the Lebanese writer Dar Al Adab, apparently after greater than two years. The e-book is translated into a number of languages, and revealed within the United States.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
After devoting final 12 months the very stunning novel by Amira Guenim “The disaster of the house of notables” (Philippe Rey), the prize jury, chaired by the Lebanese journalist and author Alexandre Najar, unanimously selected this textual content which takes its place within the nice tales of captivity. If we needed to reveal the ability of literature…
“I am my freedom”, Translated from Arabic (Palestine) by Stéphanie Dujols, Gallimard, 304 p., €22.50
https://www.lepoint.fr/livres/l-ecrivain-palestinien-nasser-abu-srour-libere-apres-32-ans-de-prison-prix-de-la-litterature-arabe-18-11-2025-2603456_37.php