Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (b 1966, Equatorial Guinea) is an author and activist. He was forced to flee to the former colonial power Spain in 2011 after he went on a hunger strike to protest the dictatorship of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. His novel By Night the Moun­tain Burns was short-listed for the UK 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His latest book, The Gurugu Pledge, is a collection of stories based on true accounts of African refugees.

In the documentary The Writer from the Country without Bookstores, he travels back to his homeland despite the inherent dangers.