The Puppet

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My starting point is the desert. As is inevitable with one’s birthplace, the desert buries enigmatic signs in the souls of its natives that slumber deep within and one day must awake. The signs that my Great Desert planted within me have made a poet of me, and a seeker after the truth of this world.1

Ibrahim al-Koni, who was born in 1948, is an international author with many authentic, salient identities. He is an award-winning Arabic-language novelist who has already published more than seventy volumes, a Moscow-educated visionary who sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life, an environmentalist, a writer who depicts desert life with great accuracy and emotional depth while adding layers of mythical and literary references the way a painter might apply luminous washes to a canvas, a Tuareg, whose mother tongue is Tamasheq, and a resident of Switzerland since 1993. Ibrahim al-Koni, winner of the 2005 Mohamed Zafzaf Award for the Arabic Novel and the 2008 Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature, 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.

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