From FolkWales Online Magazine:

"Mali's Festival au Désert and its organiser, Manny Ansar, will receive the WOMEX 13 Professional Excellence Award at an award ceremony on Sunday morning, October 27, open only to WOMEX delegates. The laudation will be offered by the freelance writer and journalist Andy Morgan (UK).

"Twelve years ago, in the deserts of northern Mali, one of Africa's most remarkable music festivals was born. It drew a veil aside to reveal a previously hidden desert culture. Since then, the Festival au Désert has found a permanent home in a sea of silky white dunes west of Timbuktu and turned it into a place where the desert can meet the world in friendship and safety and parade its beauty, its pride, its musical and human wealth. The spell that the festival cast on those dunes at Essakane held firm until just a few days before the outbreak of civil war in January, 2012, while extremism and ethnic hatred banished it from its home."