Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944 – ) is an acclaimed poet, novelist, scholar, and human rights activist. In 1966, he was interned in a military camp for participating in student demonstrations against the Moroccan government. There, he wrote his first poems and discovered his passion for writing, eventually establishing himself as one of the most outstanding writers of the Souffles-Anfas generation. He went into exile in France in 1971, where he received a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Paris and authored numerous works, including The Sacred Night (1987), for which he became the first African-born recipient of the Prix Goncourt, and This Blinding Absence of Light (2004), which received the International Dublin Literary Award. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. He lives in Paris.