Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghan movie writer and maker.

source of picture: www.afghanistantimes.af

He was born in the year 1962 in Kabul to the family of a Senior Public Servant and he went to a high school in Lycee Esteqlal. Following the soviet invasion of the country, Atiq left his country and took refuhe in Pakistan for almost a year and then he relocated to France after getting political asylum.

After his education at the Sorbone, Atiq joined a Production company that is based in Paris; it was there that he manufactured seven documentaries for French TV and some other commercials.

Atiq pushed on with his first writing activity when he took some time off in the later part of the 1990s. His Dari/Persian book, Earth and Ashes, 2000, was an immediate bestseller in the whole of South America and Europe. A film that is based on this book that was directed by Atiq, was given the award of the Prix du Regard vers l’Avenir at the Cannes Film Festival in the year 2004. The movie was featured in 50 festivals and it won 25 awards in total together with the one at the Cannes and a Golden Dhow award best feature film at the Zanzibar International Movie Festival.

Atiq won the France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt that is up to 105 years old, for Syngue Sabour in November 2008. Explained to be ‘sober and alive’ by the French culture Minister called Christine Albanel, it was translated into the English Language as ‘The patience Stone’. The fourth book that was written by Atiq, which  was his first book written in French, the novel that tells a story of a woman who had her husband injured  in the battle in a country that looks like Afghanistan and now lies as a paralyzed stone.

Going back to his country in the year 2002, Atiq was incorporated into the largest media group in his country, as a senior creative advisor. The group that was formed by brothers Saad Mohseni, Zaid Mohseni and Jahid Mohseni who owns the Tolo Television, Arman FM, KAboora Production, Afghan Scene Magazine, Lemar TV, Barbud Music, and some other media entities in the country and who shares his time between Paris and Kabul, kept working closely with Moby Group in the development of the programs and some genres for the media outlets and also assisting in the training and development of a new generation filmmakers and directors of the country.

Atiq produced and developed Tolo TV’s ‘Raz ha een Khana’, which is the first soap opera of the country, and it won a special award at the Seoul Drama Awards in October 2008.