Abdellatif LaabiBeyond the Barbed Wire
Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020 Winner of an English PEN Award Introduced by Jim Moore, with an interview by Christopher Schaefer Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s.
Arabic: عبد اللطيف اللعبيAbdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco.Laâbi, then teaching French, founded with other poets the artistic journal Souffles, an important literary review in 1966. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergency of a poetic stand and revival, but which, very quickly, crystallized all Moroccan creative energies: painters, film-makers, men of theatre, researchers and thinkers. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World.Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" (for his political beliefs and his writings) and served a sentence from 1972-1980.
