Jila Mossaed is the Prix Max Jacob étranger 2022 laureate for her poetry collection Le huitième pays (Det åttonde landet), published by Le Castor Astral and translated by Françoise Sule.

The jury characterizes the work as follows: "It is located beyond all borders. It is the fortress of the intimate, a state of peace that can be achieved despite the harshness of the outside world and the uprooting of exile. Mossaed’s poems are not only inhabited by the memories of childhood and the shadows of Iran. The current world also slips in with its struggles, its injustices and its migrations."

Jila Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, and lives in Sweden since 1986. She is a highly regarded poet, who has since 1997 published eight works of poetry in Swedish and seven books in Persian language. She is also a member of the Swedish Academy. Her books have, so far, been published in Dutch and Greek translation.

Françoise Sule is a former university teacher of French at the Stockholm university who has gained recognition for translating literary texts into French. Her next translation will be the literary non-fiction book Sirdolaččat. The Deportation of the Northern Sámi (Herrarna satte oss hit) that was awarded with the Swedish August Prize for best non-fiction book in 2020. The book will be published by CNRS Édition in France in 2023.

Jila Mossaed (born 1948)

The Book 

Det åttonde landet, 2020, poetry, 69 pages

Publisher

Bokförlaget Lejd

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Le prix Max Jacob (in French)