Abdellatif Laabi

Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles-Anfas, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi's accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie (2009), the Académie Française's Grand Prix de la Francophonie (2011), and the Roger Kowalski Award for Poetry for...See more

Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles-Anfas, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi's accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie (2009), the Académie Française's Grand Prix de la Francophonie (2011), and the Roger Kowalski Award for Poetry for Presque riens (2021). Laâbi's works have been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, and English, and Laâbi himself has translated into French the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mohammed Al-Maghout, Saâdi Youssef, Abdallah Zrika, Ghassan Kanafani, and Qassim Haddad. See less