The Bearer of the Purple Rose
Antoine Douaihy
The Bearer of the Purple Rose tells the story of a writer's arrest and imprisonment in ‘The Citadel of the Port’, a 700-year old Mamluk fortress built to guard the coast. The arrest of the writer, back from a long exile in the West, is a conundrum for all his friends, who see him as a quiet, peace-loving man. He is imprisoned in a bare cell, possessing only two high windows, impossible to reach, and a picture of the tyrant, who stares at him day and night. Perhaps his arrest confirms what his mother used to tell him: ‘Don't fear anything. What a man fears will happen to him.’ Painfully aware of his loss of freedom, he dwells on many things, including: memories from his time of exile; journeying between two worlds; old love and new love; his mother; the destruction of nature; the tragic nature of history; the strange coincidences of fate, and the courses taken by time and death.
Nomination
2014 Longlist
Antoine Douaihy
Country of origin Lebanon
About the author
Antoine Douaihy is a Lebanese novelist and poet, born in 1948. He completed his higher education in Paris, gaining a doctorate in Anthropology from the Sorbonne in 1979, and remaining in France until the mid-nineties. He currently works as Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at The Lebanese University.