Who is Boualem Sansal, the missing Franco-Algerian writer?

Emmanuel Macron says he is very concerned about his fate. What happened to Boualem Sansal? The Franco-Algerian writer has not given any news for a week, when he left Paris for Algiers. Some of his supporters fear that the 75-year-old author, fierce critic of Islamism and Algerian powerwas arrested on his arrival. “All means of pressure on Algeria must be activated to obtain its release“, says for example the leader of LR deputies Laurent Wauquiez.

If, in France, his support is numerous, in Algiers, the author is little appreciated. For 20 years, Boualem Sansal, a fervent republican and activist for the French-speaking world, has not minced his words against the Algerian regime. Already in 1999, in his first novel “The Oath of the Barbarians”he writes a bitter chronicle on the dark years of the civil war in his country. After the publication of “Tell me heaven” in 2003, he is dismissed from his post at the Algerian Ministry of Industryfor widely mocking power and denouncing corruption.

He never stopped traveling between his two countries

The Franco-Algerian achieves international fame with “2084: the end of the world“, a novel of anticipation in which he stands up against obscurantism. That year, he passed very close to the Goncourt and finally won the grand prize for the novel of the French Academy. Despite the hostility, he did not never stopped traveling between France and Algeria, where he lives part of the year. His friend, the writer Kamel Daoud, Goncourt of this year, is surprised that he passed between the. drops of the diet for so long and hope to see him in good health very soon.