Winner of the prix Goncourt, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the prix Maghreb, Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Morocco and emigrated to France in 1961. He is a regular contributor to Le Monde and has written more than thirty novels, including The Sacred Night, The Sand Child, Corruption, This Blinding Absence of Light, Leaving Tangier and others. Ben Jelloun’s prose is at once lyrical, poetic and rich in fairy tale, imagery, metaphor and symbolism.