« About My Mother »: Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel longlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize
The Book Office is thrilled to announce that Tahar Ben Jelloun’s remarkable novel About My Mother made it to the longlist of the first EBRD Literature Prize!
The prize, launched in 2017 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in partnership with the British Council and the London Book Fair, aims at promoting literature from emerging economies. To be eligible for it, the work of literary fiction has to be translated into English and recently published in the UK. The jury is composed of four judges and headed by Rosie Goldsmith, award-winning journalist at the BBC.
About My Mother came out in France in 2008 and was published by Saqi Books in the UK in July 2016, in a translation by Lulu Norman (translator of Serge Gainsbourg's songs, among others) and Ros Schwartz (Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to literature since 2009). Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Morocco’s greatest living author” according to the Guardian, was awarded the 1987 Goncourt Prize for his novel The Sacred Night and is a widely acclaimed Moroccan novelist, essayist, critic and poet.
A glimpse into About My Mother...
“Since she's been ill, my mother's become a frail little thing with a faltering memory. She summons members of her family who are long dead. She talks to them, is astonished that her mother hasn't come to visit, and sings the praises of her little brother who, she says, always brings her presents. They file past her bedside, sometimes they linger. I don't interrupt them, I don't like to upset her.”
Lalla Fatma thinks she’s in Fez in 1944, where she grew up, not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left behind.
By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother’s life in post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom resignation was the only way out.
Tender and compelling, About My Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond between mother and son. If it didn't make it to the shortlist of the EBRD Prize, we highly recommend that it makes it to your bookshelves!
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