David Tresilian applauds the selection of as member of the Jury of France's most prestigious literary award Moroccan novelist Tahar , a well-known figure in both Moroccan and French cultural circles, took a step closer to the heart of the French literary establishment early last month when he was elected a member of the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize and one of Europe's oldest. 's 1987 novel La Nuit sacrée was the first novel by an Arab author to win the Goncourt, which was established in 1896 by French man of letters Edmond de Goncourt for the best prose work of the year written in French. Since the first prize was awarded in 1903, many of France's best-known novelists have won the prize, including Proust for A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, volume two of A la recherche du temps perdu, Malraux for La condition humaine and Troyat for L'arraignée. Women who have won the prize include Simone de Beauvoir for Les Mandarins and Marguerite Duras for L'amant. Following 's 1987 win, other francophone or non-French authors have also won the Goncourt, including Patrick Chamoiseau from the French West Indies for his novel Texaco in 1992 and the Lebanese novelist and essayist Amin Maalouf for his Le Rocher de Tanios in 1993. The Prix Goncourt is awarded each year in November, and it has a purely symbolic value of 7.50 Euros, though this is more than compensated for by the increased sales enjoyed by the prize-winning work. The 10 permanent members of the Académie Goncourt meet on the first Tuesday of the month throughout the year at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where they have lunch and decide on short-listed works. New members of the jury are elected by the existing members. In addition to Tahar , the present Goncourt jury includes the president, Edmonde Charles- Roux, a former editor of Vogue magazine and "the Iron Lady of the Goncourt," the Spanish novelist Jorge Semprun, and the French television personality Bernard Pivot, formerly presenter of the literary chat show Apostrophes. 's election has been seen in France as a way of lowering the average age of the Académie -- he is a generation younger than some of the other members -- and of opening the prize up to voices from outside the French literary establishment. In a similar development, the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, who also writes in French, was elected to the Académie française in 2005. Founded in 1635, this has special responsibility for the French language and is France's oldest and most important literary institution. Born in 1944 in the Moroccan city of Fes, from where he moved as a student to Tangiers and Rabat before making his home in Paris from 1971 onwards, is the author of over a dozen novels as well as poetry and works of non-fiction. He is a regular contributor to the French newspaper Le Monde, among other publications. Two works from the mid 1970s, La Réclusion solitaire (1976) and La Plus Haute des solitudes (1977), draw on 's psychological work with immigrant Moroccan workers in France, while his novelisation of the experience of prisoners at Morocco's infamous Tazmamart prison in Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001) drew international attention to conditions there in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the publication of Ahmed Marzouki's autobiographical account in Tazmamart Cellule 10. A 1984 work, L ' Hospitalité française, examines racism in France. In his novels, has typically drawn on both his own autobiography and on the situation of the writer in a society where writing has a special value because of high illiteracy rates ( Harrouda, 1973, and L'écrivain public, 1983). Paradoxically, writing, under these circumstances, can allow those whose voices are not heard to speak. In other novels, has made criticisms of society through his employment of marginal figures, such as the madman (in Moha le fou, Moha le sage, 1978), whose words may nevertheless contain fragments of wisdom, and those whose gender identification is not fixed and may therefore seem to transgress the traditional ways of working of a masculinist society. In L'Enfant du sable (1985) and its successor La Nuit sacrée, imagines the situation of Ahmed, eighth child of a Marrakech family, who is biologically a girl. His father's desire to have a male child and the traditions of a society that does not value female children cause him to deny the sex of the baby, bringing her up as a boy in the eyes of the world and suggesting the strong social component at work in all gender identifications: "being a woman is a natural infirmity that people find a way of putting up with. Being a man is an illusion and a form of violence that everything works to promote and to justify. Being is a challenge in itself." writes in French and publishes in France, from where he has developed an international reputation. His books have been translated into 43 languages, including Arabic. At home in French, he has had a rather more ambiguous relationship to writing and publication in Arabic, though he is also the French translator of novels by the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri, who wrote in Arabic, among other works. He has complained about the literary standards of the Arabic translations of his own works and the circumstances of their publication. Many of his books have been either bowdlerised or pirated in Arabic translation, says.
