THE PUNISHMENT, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

151pp., hardback, d.w.. First English Language Edition, New Haven, 2020

First published in 2018 in French as La Punition.

An account of Moroccan novelist, poet, critic and essayist Tahar Ben Jelloun's 18 months in a brutal military camp in Ahermemon, after his arrest in 1967 for taking part in student demonstrations in Casablanca.

Ben Jelloun was born in Fez in 1944. His family moved to Tangier in 1956. He studied philosophy at Rabat university, and, after his unexpected release in 1968, taught for three years at schools in Tetuan and Casablanca. In 1971, after the government decreed that philosophy be taught only in classical Arabic and banned the literary journal, Souffles, for which he wrote, he left for Paris. He now moves between Paris and Tangier and is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Républica, El País, and Panorama. His novels include The Sand Child, The Sacred Night and This Blinding Absence of Light.