The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco
Front cover of The Last Storytellers
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| Author | Richard Hamilton |
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| Country | United States and United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Traditional Moroccan oral storytelling |
| Publisher | I.B. Tauris |
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Publication date
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30 May 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 264 pp. |
| ISBN | |
The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco is a book by radio and television journalist Richard Hamilton. The book contains a foreword by the travel writer and publisher Barnaby Rogerson.
The Last Storytellers explores the roots of traditional storytelling, the background of a number of oral storytellers whom the author met whilst working for the BBC in Morocco, and it contains an anthology of thirty six of the tales they tell.
The Last Storytellers explores the roots of traditional storytelling, the background of a number of oral storytellers whom the author met whilst working for the BBC in Morocco, and it contains an anthology of thirty six of the tales they tell.
As a reviewer notes, the famous square and market place Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech has hosted professional storytellers since the foundation of the city in 1070 by the Almoravid leader Abu Bakr ibn Umar. Now, however, only a handful of these storytellers remain at such places, "captivating audiences with tales and stories of love and death, trickery and justice", and the art is in decline. In 2008, the United Nations agency UNESCO recognized Jemaa el-Fnaa as the first "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."
Speaking in an interview given to the Society for Storytelling, Richard Hamilton says that he first met the storytellers — "without exception, elderly men at the end of their career" — whilst on a related assignment for the BBC at the end of 2006. This interest developed into what he terms "an obsession", or calling, to collect as many stories as he could, whilst he still could, with the help of a local resident, Ahmed Tija, who interpreted the Darija Arabic dialect of the storytellers.
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