Guest of the ilb 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008
Azouz Begag was born the son of an Algerian guestworker in Villeurbanne near Lyon in 1957. He did a PhD in economics and worked as a sociologist in Paris and Lyon. Alongside his economics studies, in which Begag focused on the mobility and identity of immigrants, he has written highly regarded novels for children, young people and adults. His literary work has been well received by critics and the public in France, as well as in Germany, and is often part of regional studies dossiers for French lessons at school.
In 1986, Begag became the most well-known representative of the »littérature beure« with his first, autobiographically coloured youth novel »Le gone du chaâba« in which he describes his childhood in a bidonville in Lyon, a »slum-like« suburban settlement of shacks and corrugated iron huts. In literary texts, theatre and music pieces of the »Beurs«, young people of North African origin who grew up in France, the life feeling of this second immigrant generation was articulated in the eighties, the integration of which is still a burning problem in French society.
Begag focuses on the possibility of belonging to two cultures and the double identity, between a far and unknown homeland and a new, unfamiliar country, with which young people of Maghrebian origin in France have to deal with. The author clearly shows the efforts of the »guestworker«, child Azouz, to be accepted in his own country. Azouz has to cope with isolation which he experiences while growing up, on the one hand because of his intelligence; he distances himself from the milieu of his parents who are illiterate and from the Arabic family traditions. But on the other hand, he always feels the stigma of his North African origin through his fellow pupils.
With this, Begag doesn’t place emphasis »on pity and sentimentality, but on the subversive power of humour, on exposing comic and exact detail.« (»Neue Zürcher Zeitung«). »Le gone du Chaâba« was awarded many prizes including, in 1986, the French journalist’s prize »Prix du meilleur roman«. The filmed version by the director Christophe Ruggia was shown at the Berlinale in 1998.
The politically active author knows the problems of the banlieues from his own biography and understands his writing, journalistic and academic work as a contribution to a Franco-Maghrebian identity and as a possibility to mediate between the political elite in France and the reality of the immigrant quarters. In his continuation novel »Béni ou le paradis privé« which came out in France in 1989, he concentrates even more on everyday racism in France which starts where people are harassed into violence. Since 2004, Begag has been a member of the "conceil économique et social", and he was appointed State Secretary for the Promotion of Equal Opportunities in 2005. After disputes with the then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy he resigned his post. His most recently published book is an accont of his two year tenure as a minister. The title, »Le mouton dans la baignoire« (2007; The sheep in the bath) is a play on the public exhortation of Sarkozy that muslims shouldn’t slaughter sheep in their bathtubs. He is a Chevalier de L'Ordre national du Mérite and Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Begag lives in Paris.
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