Selected Poems

Laabi Abdellatif

Abdellatif Laabi is the most important contemporary Moroccan poet, editor, novelist, translator and public intellectual. From 1972 to 1980 Laabi was imprisoned for his peaceful activism against the repressive regime of Hassan II; he was adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and received the Prix de la Liberte from French PEN on his release in 1981. His poetry often uses fragmented, exploded forms to register the violence and dislocations his country has experienced. This book includes a generous selection of Laabi's poetry from the late 1960s to the 2010s, with a special emphasis on his prison writings from the 1970s. The book also features an extensive interview with the author.

About the Author

Abdellatif Laabi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. In the 1960s, Laabi was the founding editor of Souffles, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laabi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laabi's most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poesie for his "Oeuvres completes" ("Collected Poems") in 2009, and the Academie francaise's Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. Laabi himself has translated into French the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mohammed Al-Maghout, Saadi Youssef, Abdallah Zrika, Ghassan Kanafani and Qassim Haddad.

Reviews

"Laabi's rhythm and flow come through in these incantatory verses of struggle and love for a reimagined land" – World Literature Today

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