Festival du livre africain de Marrakech 2026 (FLAM)
SOUS LA PRÉSIDENCE D’HONNEUR DE JMG LE CLÉZIO | PRIX NOBEL DE LITTÉRATURE
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Programme
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Edit and Preserve: The Challenges of Publishing in Africa
Dialogues
Publishing in Africa means facing high production costs, limited distribution networks, and often hindered book circulation. How can we publish, distribute, and make authors visible in an ecosystem where every step—printing, transporting, selling, preserving—encounters structural obstacles?
To these contemporary challenges is added another urgency: preserving and transmitting the continent’s libraries and heritage collections. How do we protect centuries of manuscript knowledge when material, political, or climatic conditions threaten their survival? How can today’s publishing be articulated with the safeguarding of what forms our written memory?
Yet, despite these constraints, beautiful initiatives are emerging. Remarkably creative publishers are inventing new models, crafting beautiful books, and carrying projects that testify to the vitality and resilience of the African publishing landscape.
Speakers: Layla Chaouni – Malika Slaoui – Ysabel Saïah Baudis – Lola Shoneyin – Ismaël Diadié Haidara
Moderator: Rodney Saint-Éloi
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Writing When Everything Wavers
Open Book
How does the act of writing allow us to rebuild and reinvent ourselves in the face of reality’s complexity? How does the creative process help us overcome moments of inner tension or personal doubt? To what extent do the characters and stories we create help us better understand our own experiences? Creating to recreate oneself is embarking on a journey where literature becomes both mirror and refuge—a space where writing allows us to reconnect with ourselves and explore uncharted inner paths.
Speakers: Pierre Assouline – In Koli Jean Bofane – David Diop – Christiane Taubira -Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin
Moderator: Alice D’Andigné
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Writing in a Major Key
Open Book
Music traverses African literature as a living energy: it gives style its tempo, paces the narration, and imprints stories with a distinct cadence made of surges, silences, and syncopations. Jazz, rumba, and popular rhythms become ways of writing, listening, and resisting.
Through books, this musicality becomes living memory. Literature celebrates and transmits the great voices of song on the continent, extending their rhythms and stories, and offering their echoes a space to continue resonating.
Speakers: Katia Dansoko Touré – Daniel Maximin – Phillip B. Williams – Ysabel Saïah Baudis
Moderator: Alain Mabanckou
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Writing to Break Down Borders
Open Book
This panel questions what becomes of lives when the world barricades itself and excessively « frontierizes. » What do we do with necessary escapes, suspended existences, unfindable places? How do we inhabit a present that classifies, expels, fragments?
Beyond tangible borders lie interior ones, nestled within bodies, languages, memories, and narratives. Everyday discriminations, identity assignments, linguistic fractures, imposed silences: so many invisible lines that separate, wound, and prevent. In this space where external and internal borders echo each other, what can literature do? Can it open breaches, welcome those whom borders reject, invent passages where all seems closed?
Speakers: Touhfat Mouhtare – Philomé Robert – Nassera Tamer – Samira El Ayachi
Moderator: Fathia Elaouni
7:15 PM - 7:30 PM
Award Ceremony: Marrakech High School Literary Prize
Prize Ceremony
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
The « State of Poetry » as a Barrier Against the Night
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Stories That Liberate
Dialogues
How can literature become a space of emancipation, capable of shifting perspectives, resisting dominant narratives, and making other futures conceivable? The speakers will reflect on how their works engage with intimate and collective memory, rehabilitate long-silenced voices, and act upon readers’ imaginations. The panel will highlight the power of narratives from the Global South—often silenced—that nevertheless carry other philosophies of life and other ways of inhabiting the world, breaking with imposed frameworks. Which books, which forms, which stories today enable liberation, repair, reconciliation? And how do these narratives displace centers to open new possibilities?
Speakers: Christiane Taubira – Chigozie Obioma – Phillip B. Williams – David Diop
Moderator: Yasmine Chami
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Book Signing Session
Signings & Dedication
Present : Christiane Taubira – Chigozie Obioma – Alain Mabanckou – Phillip B. Williams – David Diop
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where Danger Grows, Let Us Make Fire
Open Book
Inspired by Rodney Saint-Éloi’s latest poetry collection « Fais du feu » (Make Fire) and Friedrich Hölderlin’s verse « Where danger grows, so too does what saves, » this panel questions the power of poetic speech in the face of contemporary crises. Is poetry refuge, resistance, or beginning? By making fire with words and images, do poets not seek to illuminate reality differently, to shift its lines, to invent other possibilities where all seems to close?
Speakers: Iman Mersal – Rodney Saint-Éloi – Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe – Siham Bouhlal – Daniel Maximin
Moderator: Valérie Marin La Meslée
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Imaginaries in Motion
Panorama of Moroccan Literature
From the intimate to the political, from memory to contemporary recompositions, this panel offers a living panorama of Moroccan literary creation through singular and powerful voices. With Soundouss Chraibi, Samira El Ayachi, Nassera Tamer, Driss Ksikes, and Hajar Azell, a common impulse emerges: a literature engaged with its time, traversed by questions of identity, transmission, and transformation.
Speakers: Nassera Tamer – Hajar Azell – Driss Ksikes – Samira El Ayachi – Soundouss Chraïbi
Moderator: Yasmine chami
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Imagining Other Possibilities with JMG Le Clézio
Moderator: Alice D’Andigné
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
From Vertigo to Vertigo (Poetic and Musical Recital)
Nocturne
Artistes :
– Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe (text, slam poetry & vocals)
– Caroline Bentz (piano & vocals)
– Seny Camara (kora & vocals)
– Lola Malique (cello & vocals)
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Another Possible Is Possible
Dialogues
At a time when dominant narratives seem saturated—between ecological crises, political dead ends, and fatigue of imaginaries—a question imposes itself: how to reopen the field of possibilities? Echoing Arturo Escobar’s reflections on transitions and bifurcations carried by epistemologies of the South, this panel proposes to question the power of imaginaries as a force for transformation. For before alternatives can manifest in reality, they must first be spoken, thought, told. What roles do words, narratives, and literature then play in fabricating other worlds? And how do voices from the South contribute to shifting frameworks, unsettling certainties, and opening unprecedented horizons?
Speakers: Ali Benmakhlouf – Yanick Lahens – Driss Ksikes – Mustapha Fahmi
Moderator: Hanane Harrath
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Book Signing Session
Signings & Dedication
Present: Ali Benmakhlouf – Yanick Lahens– Driss Ksikes – Mustapha Fahmi
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Our Rebellious Heritage
Open Book
This panel brings together four writers whose works, from Africa, the Caribbean, America, and diasporic worlds, question plural identities, composite heritage, and memories traversed by history. All explore the fractures and forces that shape existences—memorial wounds, migrations, shifting belonging, structural violence, visible and invisible borders—while opening spaces where language becomes resistance, breath, and reinvention.
Speakers: Alain Mabanckou – Mustapha Fahmi – Phillip B. Williams – Daniel Maximin
Moderator: Valérie Marin La Meslée
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Being Born to Writing: The Forging of the First Novel
Open Book
How does one become a writer at the moment of the first book? What unfolds, in the shadows, between hesitations, intimate demands, and editorial pressures? This panel proposes to enter the backstage of a first novel’s birth: a space of doubts, choices, and ruptures, where a voice is invented. Between the necessity of writing and the desire to speak the world, how is an imagination forged capable of opening other possibilities?
Speakers: Katia Dansoko Touré – Steve Aganze – Ève Guerra – Soundouss Chraïbi
Moderator: Hanane Harrath
6:00 PM - 6:45 PM
Patrick Chamoiseau: _What Can Literature Do When It Cannot?
7:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Agustín Gómez Arcos, Living Memory
Tribute
Tribute to Agustín Gómez Arcos by Mahi Binebine
Lecture de Ouidad El-Majaty
7:45 PM - 8:00 PM
Saham Bank-FLAM Awards Ceremony
Prize Ceremony
8:15 PM - 9:15 PM
Kalam Palabre (Poetic and Musical Recital)
Nocturne
Artists:
– Perrine Fifadji (reading & vocals)
– Edouard Lhoumeau (Saxophone & Duduk)
– Ziad BenYoussef (reading, oud)