The Guards of the Air
Rosa Yaseen Hasan
The Guards of the Air (Al-Kawkab, Beirut, 2009) tells the story of a political prisoner who suffers torture at the hands of the Syrian regime. By focusing on the breakdown of the relationship between the prisoner and his lover, the novel demonstrates how imprisonment, distance and daily anxiety can extinguish the flame of love and the dignity of the individual. The narrator, a woman who works with political asylum seekers in a foreign embassy, reflects on the sufferings of so many young Arab men who have experienced violence at the hands of Arab regimes through their social and political allegiances.
Nomination
2010 Longlist
Rosa Yaseen Hasan
Country of origin Syria
About the author
Syrian novelist and journalist Rosa Yaseen Hasan was born in Damascus in 1974. She studied architectural engineering at university before going on to write for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals in the field of cultural journalism. In 2000, she published a collection of short stories entitled A Sky Polluted by Light. Her first novel Ebony, published in 2004, won the Hanna Mina Prize for the Novel and has been translated into German. She also published a documentary novel in Cairo entitled A Negative of Political Arrests in 2008.