Writer Boualem Sansal, imprisoned in Algeria, receives the Cino del Duca literary prize

The French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal , imprisoned in Algeria for attacks on territorial integrity, received the Cino del Duca World Prize on Wednesday.

Endowed with 200,000 euros by the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation (a Franco-Italian press publisher), this prize "pays tribute to the strength of a writer who, beyond borders and censorship, continues to make a free, deeply humanist and resolutely necessary voice heard," the jury said in a press release.

Boualem Sansal, awarded for his entire body of work, joins the list of authors such as Andrei Sakharov, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera. Kamel Daoud also won this award in 2019.

The principle of the prize, created in 1969, is to " crown the career of a French or foreign author whose work constitutes, in scientific or literary form, a message of modern humanism."

Diplomatic struggle between Algeria and France

Boualem Sansal, 80, has been in detention since his arrest in mid-November at Algiers airport.

He was sentenced on March 27 to five years in prison, notably for statements made in October to the French far-right media outlet Frontières, in which he claimed that Algeria had inherited territories previously belonging to Morocco under French colonization.

An appeal trial is scheduled for June 24 .

The writer is the subject of a diplomatic struggle between Algeria and France. Algiers believes that justice has taken its normal course, while Paris calls for a "humane gesture" towards a man suffering from cancer .

Since the summer of 2024, Algeria and France have been experiencing a diplomatic crisis considered one of the most serious since Algeria's independence in 1962. It has been marked by the freezing of all cooperation between the two countries, and recently by a new series of expulsions of officials on both sides.