With his sharp wit and taste for provocation, French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal has long blamed the low profile of writers in his native country on the fact that he has been left alone, despite regular press campaigns against him. "The letter carrier in my village," he told Le Monde, "asked me one day what I did with all the books I received. I wearily replied that I was a writer. 'Scrivener,' the civil servant replied! He showed me a table and told me I could come here and write people's letters to the authorities."

His arrest on November 16, at the airport in Algiers, and his detention in a prison unit in a hospital of Algeria's capital (which he has appealed), have refuted the steady optimism that animates his books, where behind the darkness there are always possible reconciliations on the horizon. In his 2020 book Abraham ou la cinquième alliance ("Abraham or the Fifth Alliance"), for instance, he sketches out a system for future harmony among religions.

A writer of French culture and literary expression, Sansal made it his duty to remain in Algeria, having lived since the end of his studies in the university town of Boumerdès, 45 kilometers from Algiers, in a relatively protected environment. But this lifelong opponent of Islamism, an academic whose latest novel, Vivre. Le compte à rebours ("To Live: The Countdown"), published in January, depicts an Earth doomed to disappear into a black hole, a man who believes "that there is nothing more to expect from religions," observed that even Boumerdès was filling up with mosques.

Writing from Algeria

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