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An exiled Syrian author and journalist whose inside account of the revolution drew such ire from Syria’s government that she was forced to flee the country has won a literary award from PEN for her courage.
Samar Yazbek was named by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy on Monday as the international writer of courage with whom she will share the PEN/Pinter prize. The award goes to a writer who, in Pinter’s own words, shows a "fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" today. Duffy was picked as winner by judges including Pinter’s widow Antonia Fraser in July, and then worked with English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee to select Yazbek, in recognition of her book A Woman in the Crossfire.
The title, published in the UK by Haus, details Yazbek’s opposition to the Assad regime, interspersing her own observations of the recent bloody conflict with the stories of the people at the heart of the revolution. On publication, she was denounced by her clan and harassed by the country’s security forces, according to English PEN, until she was forced into exile with her young daughter.
Yazbek said that giving the prize to the "author of the Syrian revolution’s diaries" was "an important sign of the recognition of the Syrian people’s struggle". "I am grateful to English PEN, and to Carol Ann Duffy, for selecting this book, and through it, for supporting our cause," said the journalist, author and novelist, whose 2008 novel Cinnamon will be published in English this November by Arabia Books, an imprint of Haus.
Last year, the award was won by the playwright David Hare, who chose to share it with Roberto Saviano, the Italian author who has lived under police protection since the publication of his book Gomorrah : Italy’s Other Mafia. Fraser said that Duffy’s "recognition of "Yazbek’s courage in writing about Syria’s revolution from the inside could not come at a more appropriate time".
(Alison Flood, The Gardian Tuesday 9 October 2012)
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