Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun: “Writing is a way of telling the world that you still exist.”

When you have been marginalized, exiled, or made invisible — by poverty, by migration, by oppression — writing becomes an act of insisting on your own presence. It says: I am here. I have not disappeared. My experience is real and it matters.

Ben Jelloun won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for The Sacred Night, a novel about a Moroccan woman raised as a boy. France was in a heated national debate about North African immigration and the identity of French culture, making his win a flashpoint in arguments about who belonged in French literary life.

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.