Assia Djebar

Brilliant student, novelist, filmmaker and historian, Assia Djebar wrote Algeria from the inside — its silences, its women, its memory. She crossed languages and forms, from novels to documentary films, always returning to the voices that history had pushed aside.

She is one of the most important Algerian and Maghrebi writers of her generation, and the first writer from the Maghreb elected to the Académie française.

Her real name was Fatma-Zohra Imalayène; she chose her pen name as a young writer.