I’ve just been listening to Yvan Amar’s Danse des Mots program on Radio France (about which I’ve blogged before), in which he interviewed Afghan/French writer and film maker Atiq Rahimi. Rahimi has just won the Prix Goncourt 2009 for his latest book Syngue Sabour (pierre de patience). Syngue Sabour is Persian – his mother tongue – for ‘stone of patience’. Rahimi took the idea of the ‘stone of patience’ from ‘a folk tale about a black stone that absorbs the distress of anyone who confides in it’, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Prix Goncourt has been running for 105 years and has been awarded to many great French and non-French writers. Among the former group are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

The most fascinating part of the interview, for me, was when Rahimi talked about writing in French, his second language. He said that writing in French was liberating, but also imposed certain obligations. For example, he has to concentrate on each word, and also on the rhythm and sound of the words. He has to write and re-write, to check each word in the dictionary. In this way, it was like poetry, he said, because in poetry you must work on each word, each phrase, each comma. You have to be both precise and concise with each phrase, each image.

If you’d like to listen to or download the interview yourself, you’ll find it here.