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Soleïman Adel Guémar is a poet and writer working in French, who now lives in Wales. He was born into a Berber family in Algiers in 1963. He studied electrical engineering at an army-controlled academy, where he endured three months in army prison for ‘indiscipline’ (i.e. wanting to leave). He then spent two years in Paris, working in publishing. He returned to Algeria in 1991 amid signs of democratisation and worked as a journalist for the weekly L’Evènement (banned), then as a freelance, writing for a range of newspapers, magazines and websites. As well as reports and opinion pieces, he also published numerous stories and poems, winning two national poetry prizes. In 1999 he set up his own publishing company and applied for a licence to produce a magazine of investigative journalism. Algeria is a candidate for the world’s most dangerous country for journalists: 51 have been killed with impunity since 1994, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Guémar received escalating threats; in 2002 his house was ransacked and his files were stolen; and when he was physically attacked by men with knives, his family insisted he leave the country. He suggests that his attackers were working for the ‘military-financial mafia’ which runs Algeria, using Islamist extremists as its puppets.

   Guémar applied for asylum on arrival at Heathrow in December
2002. After three other enforced changes of address, the Home Office sent him, his wife and their three young children to live in South Wales in autumn 2003. In September 2004 he heard that his case had at last been decided: the family now has indefinite leave to remain in the UK.

   Adel Guémar’s poetry is unavoidably political. It can be as brutally
cruel as his country’s experiences, but its mainspring is a passionate
belief in human rights and dignity. Horrors are offset by ironic utopian fantasies and dark comedy. He often uses the regular metres and forms of classical French verse, subverting them with metrical dislocations, demotic language and the jargon of militias and torturers.