Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems

By Abdellatif Laabi

A career-spanning 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, which discusses his renewed prominence on the Moroccan intellectual scene after the Arab Spring, once a new generation of artists and activists began looking to him as a source of inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784100551

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, or Breaths, a widely-inf luential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi’s most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes (Collected Poems) in 2009, and the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. 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.