A man lives on the run, in hiding. A Jihadist group has seized power, and the main character of this gripping story is forced to take refuge in the house of the woman he loved. Immersed in his confinement, he gives himself up to his thoughts only to be trapped in a spiral of fears, uncertainty and remorse, from which he is only consoled by the imaginary dialogue he establishes with Nacereddine, an ancestor of his. “I Am Alone” takes us to a city located on the border of the Mauritanian Sahara, accompanied by a cosmopolitan character who touched the sky with his hands as a result of opportunism and corruption, being sunk into hell when luck turned on him. His soliloquy leads him to question the events in a country torn apart by Jihadist terrorism and economic and intellectual poverty, where colonialism continues to cast its dark shadow. The tension between tradition and modernity runs through this book by Beyrouk, which has been translated into Spanish for the first time.

The author and José Naranjo, a journalist in West Africa, will be talking about the book. Alejandro de los Santos, the book’s translator, and Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Relations Coordinator, will be presenting the event.

Beyrouk. Born in 1957, in Atar, Mauritania. After working as a journalist for many years, he founded the first independent newspaper in his country in 1988, presided over the first independent press association and campaigned for freedom of the press and freedom of opinion. He has had six novels and a book of short stories published. With “Le Tambour des larmes” he won the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma in 2015 and the Prix Roman Métis des Lycéens in 2016 and with “I Am Alone” he received the Ahmed Baba African Literature Prize in 2018, as well as being a finalist for the Prix des Cinq Continents in 2019. “I Am Alone” is his first novel to be translated into Spanish.