Writing without Veils

On 21 January a conference will be held in Turin called "Writing Without Veils: Words and Women from the Maghreb to Iran" will be attended by 20 female literary figures from North Africa and the Middle East. It will precede the award ceremony of the International Premio Grinzane Cavour Award for Literature, which is being bestowed this year to Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar.



The Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker, is one of North-Africa's best-known and most widely acclaimed writers. Djebar has also published poetry, plays, and short stories, and has produced two films. In her books Djebar has explored the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman's world in its complexities. Her strong feminist stance has earned her much praise. Several of her works deal with the impact of the war on women's mind.

"Just so I could have worries that never change whether it's peace or wartime, so I could wake up in the middle of the night and question myself on what it is that sleeps in the depths of the heart of the man sharing my bed... Just so I could give birth and weep, for life never comes unaccompanied to a woman, death is always right behind, furtive, quick, and smiling at the mothers..." (from 'There Is No Exile' in Women in Their Apartments, 1980)

Premio Grinzane Cavour President Giuliano Soria describes the conference: "The purpose of the Turin conference is to foster greater knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture in Italy, from a female perspective, transcending widespread stereotypes that prevail in Western countries".

Premio Grinzane Cavour was established in 1982 by Chairman Giuliano Soria, in the most authentic heart of Piedmont, Italy, firstly in Alba and then in Turin, with the institutional intent of drawing young readers closer to books. Seat of the Award is the Grinzane Cavour castle, built in the first half of the 13th century, home during this past century to the great Italian statesman, Camillo Benso di Cavour. Objective of the Award is to privilege schools and students, spreading the pleasure of reading books not strictly related to school curricula. This is where the idea two panels - the critics and the students - was born.

Literary critics, essayists, writers, journalists and Italian cultural world personalities are called to assess the competing books. Students play a leading role: organised in seventeen School Panels, members are recruited in high schools throughout Italy, in Italian Lyceums in Brussels, Buenos Aires, Fiume, Paris and Prague, in the Italian Studies Institute at the universities of Moscow, Salamanca (Spain), Connecticut (USA) and Stockholm.

Faithful to this democratic mechanism, the event fulfils the institutional objective. The central issue of reading is not about "selling more books" but about encouraging reading. Premio Grinzane aims at facilitating and proposing a new way of living and perceiving reading, well aware that the award's maximum justification is creating new readers.

Tags: Morocco, Algeria, Maghreb, literature