The Scarecrow

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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, a Tuareg whose mother tongue is Tamasheq, and a resident of Switzerland from 1993 through 2012, although he currently lives in Spain. 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. In 2010, he was awarded the Egyptian State Prize for the Arabic Novel. And in 2015 he was named as one of the ten finalists for the Man Booker International Prize for his body of work.

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 later worked as a journalist. He 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, New Waw, and The Puppet have been published in English translation, and The Fetishists is highly anticipated. 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.

A rare talk by Ibrahim al-Koni (in Arabic with English subtitles) appears at http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/ibrahim-al-koni-desert-we-visit-death, and also on YouTube.