Best Translated Book Award Who are the jokers? The Jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set.
In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l\'Acad mie fran aise and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Soci t des gens de lett.
He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette.
In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet.
When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States.
Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said-New York line.
At ageseventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there.
The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalaur at and developed a love of classical literature.
About the Author: Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life.
The joke is on them all.
And the Jokers are Karim, Omar, Heykal, Urfy, and their friends, free spirits who see the other Jokers for the Jokers they are and have cooked up a sophisticated and, most important, foolproof plan to enliven public life with a dash of subversive humor.
The Jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose.
Best Translated Book Award Who are the jokers? The Jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set
