Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun: “Beauty is born from the wound.”

The most powerful and enduring art, writing, and music often emerge from suffering rather than comfort. Pain cracks something open and what pours through — if you survive it — can become the most alive thing you ever make. Suffering does not prevent beauty; it sometimes creates it.

Ben Jelloun wrote during a period of significant violence in Algeria, where a civil war between the government and Islamist groups from 1991 to 2002 killed tens of thousands. The cultural and psychological devastation of that conflict inflected the work of many North African writers working in France during this period.

Moroccan novelist and poet writing in French who won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for The Sacred Night. His work addresses themes of immigration, identity, racism, and the experience of North Africans in Europe, and he is one of the most internationally celebrated Arab writers of his generation.