Diversity of voices, diversity of languages : one week of events and readings in Lyon and in the Rhône-Alpes region.
Ali Bader
D.R.
AUTHOR
Iraq
Born on the west bank of the Tigris in Bagdad in 1964, Ali Bader lives in Brussels today (Belgium recently granted him political asylum). This compulsive writer has authored eleven novels, six essays, four poetry colletions, a travelogue, three translations, more than three hundred literary critiques and opinions, roughly fifty news articles (he spent a long time as a war correspondent), and several screenplays.
As a child, due to his communist father’s clandestine political activities, he several times had to assume a new identity and moved frequently. His long period of nomadism through Iraq’s religious geography—he was Muslim or Christian depending on the environment—he learned very early to juggle narratives and fiction.
Like most Iraqi writers of his generation, he had to wait several years to be read in the Arab world: the embargo imposed on Iraq considerably slowed the circulation of books. He nonetheless managed to get his third novel, Papa Sartre, to a publisher and it was published in Beirut in May 2001. The recipient of several important literary prizes, like the Al-Chabbi award in Tunis, Papa Sartre was reprinted five times by the same publisher and met with a commercial success that was fairly undreamed of in the Arab book market.
Since 2001, Bader has published a book a year with the regularity of a Swiss clock, and is recognized as a particularly unusual voice in Arabophone literature. Interested primarily in the fringes of Iraqi society, anecdotes, and the shady places and cultural and social reversals of Bagdad, Bader renders better than anyone this city’s tumultuous complexity, its relationship between center and periphery, its identity issues, violence and more.
