Albert Lownders Book Award: Arthur Sardan honors the memory of Syrian prison survivors.
French journalist Arthur Sardin won the 2026 Albert Londres Book Prize for his book, "The Name of the Shadows: Exiting the Hell of a Syrian Prison," documenting the horrors of one of the most brutal prisons of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Through this work Sardan wanted to honor "the memory of the survivors of the Syrian detention system". The journalist works as a reporter in Beirut, where he covers events in the Middle East, and seeks to shed light on the lives of people who have been ignored by the political violence and bombings, and sometimes by the media itself.