“France is over for me”: Boualem Sansal says he needs to dwell in Belgium | EUROtoday
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“France is over for me. […] I only have a few months left to live in this country and I’m leaving.” As he joined the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium (ARLLFB) on Saturday April 25, the writer Boualem Sansal is at the heart of a new controversy after these comments made to TF1.
“I still have a few years to live, peacefully. I’m going to go I don’t know where,” he continues. “With the Belgians if they need me or elsewhere, don’t fret. I write books, in the event that they wish to publish them, they publish them. If they do not wish to, they do not publish and that is it. France, for me, it is over.”
From Gallimard to Grasset
The set up of Boualem Sansal comes amid turmoil within the Parisian world of publishing linked to his arrival at Grasset, a home managed by the conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
Last month, Boualem Sansal left his historic writer, Gallimard, and his arrival at Grasset coincides with the departure of the CEO of this home, Olivier Nora, thought-about by many authors as a “dismissal” determined by Vincent Bolloré. The two leaders disagreed on the publication date of the Franco-Algerian author’s subsequent guide, in the end anticipated for June.
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“Why, before my arrival at Grasset, no one said ‘The people who are at Grasset are at Bolloré’… I arrive and they say ‘Ah, he is at Bolloré'”, protests the author, seeing it as a “cabal” to discredit him. “Bolloré, I never met him, I don’t know this gentleman. He doesn’t need me, I don’t need him.”
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“I hate Paris”
Incarcerated in Algeria for a 12 months for sure positions on his native nation, the author discovered freedom in November 2025. He was pardoned by Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who had responded favorably to a request from the German authorities.
The octogenarian is right this moment present process medical remedy within the Paris area for a number of severe pathologies. But “I hate Paris, I don’t think I’m going to stay in France.”
To (re)learnBoualem Sansal pardoned by the Algerian president: the disavowal of the Retailleau technique
His election to the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium made up of 40 “armchairs”, ten of which reserved for foreigners, befell in October 2025, just a few weeks earlier than his launch. The Academy then mentioned it needed to honor a person “highly holding the creative function of the writer”, in its eyes “inseparable from the freedom in which it is exercised”.
With AFP
https://www.france24.com/fr/france/20260425-france-pour-moi-est-fini-alg%C3%A9rie-boualem-sansal-dit-vouloir-vivre-belgique-bollor%C3%A9