International Literature Festival Berlin: Boualem Sansal becomes patron

Sansal will give a welcoming speech at the opening on September 3rd in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. There is also a separate event dedicated to him.

The author, who was born in a mountain village in the Algerian province of Oran in 1949, is a trained mechanical engineer and made his debut in 1999 with the crime novel “The Oath of the Barbarians” about the aftermath of the civil war in the early 1990s. He then lost his position as director in the Algerian Ministry of Industry.

Sansal, who writes in French, has repeatedly dealt with the traumatic history of Algeria and is considered one of the most important literary voices in the Maghreb. In 2011 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

After representing the positions of Morocco and France in the Western Sahara conflict, he was sentenced to five years in prison without parole in Dar El Beida near Algiers in March 2025. The court found that he had endangered the “territorial integrity of Algeria” with his statements.

In November 2025, Sansal was pardoned by the Algerian president and allowed to travel to Berlin. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier supported the writer. Previous initiatives by French President Emmanuel Macron had been unsuccessful.