Detained French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal hospitalized again

French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, imprisoned by Algerian authorities on national security charges, was again hospitalized on Monday, December 16, according to his French editor, raising fears about the 75-year-old’s health in detention. Sansal, a major figure in modern francophone literature, was arrested on November 16 at the Algiers airport at a time of growing tensions between France and its former colony.

“We have just learned, this morning, that at his request he was today again taken into a penitentiary care unit,” Antoine Gallimard, head of the Gallimard editing house, told several hundred people who attended a support meeting at a Paris theater.

“It’s the second time, and at his request. So what are we to understand?” he said, adding that Algerian authorities “understand that his health is fragile and that his disappearance would be very serious, for them as well.”

A relative latecomer to writing, Sansal turned to novels in 1999 and has tackled subjects including the horrific 1990s civil war in Algeria between authorities and Islamists.

In 2015, he won the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy, the guardians of the French language, for his book 2084. The end of the world (2084: The End of the World), a dystopian novel inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four and set in an Islamist totalitarian world in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

His books are not banned in Algeria but he is a controversial figure, particularly since making a visit to Israel in 2014.

Sansal’s criticism of Islamism has not been confined to Algeria – he has also warned of a creeping Islamisation in France, a stance that has made him a favored author of prominent figures on the right and far right.