Multiple Nobel Prize-winning authors have signed a petition to demand the release of Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. Boualem Sansal, a 75-year-old Franco-Algerian writer famous in France and around the world for his novels that critique Islamic extremism in Algeria, was arrested in Algiers on 16 November as he returned from Paris. News of his arrest follows initial fears of Sansal’s disappearance, provoking even France’s president Emmanuel Macron to demand information on his whereabouts.
Algerian press has confirmed Sansal is in detention in the country but there is no official word of the charges against him. In response to the arrest, French news magazine Le Point has released a letter written by Kamel Daoud and signed by multiple famous authors, demanding Sansal’s immediate release. “This tragic news reflects an alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is nothing more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonment, and the surveillance of the entire society,” the letter reads.
Signatories of the letter include the Nobel Prize winners , Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk, and Wole Soyinka. Sansal himself has been regularly tipped as a potential winner of the prize. Others to sign the letter include renowned authors , Peter Sloterdjik and Roberto Saviano.
“Sansal writes, he does not kill and does not imprison anyone,” Daoud implores. Throughout his literary career, Sansal has courted controversy for his literary critiques of Alge.