Zakaria Tamer

Zakaria Tamer was born in Damascus in 1931. The son of a blacksmith, he nonetheless was recognized as a writer and journalist when still young. He is in particular the acknowledged master of the short story in Arabic. The increasing amount of political satire in his work obliged him to go into exile in the 1980s , and he has since then been living in England. This text is from القنفذ, The Hedgehog, published in Beirut in 2005.