Mohammed Dib

Mohammed Dib was born on the twenty-first of July 1920 at Tlemcen, in north-western Algeria near the Moroccan border, into a cultivated Tlemceni family of craftspeople that had descended into poverty. The house carried the courtly legacy of Moorish Andalusia; his forebears Ghouti Dib and Mohammed Dib were masters of the city's Arab-Andalusian music. In 1931, when the boy was eleven, his father died of pneumonia, leaving his mother a widow with six children of whom Mohammed was the eldest.

Raised amid that hardship, he began writing poetry and painting as a youth, and by his late teens was teaching schoolchildren near Oujda in Morocco. Through his twenties and thirties he lived by many trades, working as a teacher, a weaver and carpet designer, a bookkeeper, an interpreter, and a journalist, all the while gathering the world that would fill his books.

He achieved international standing with the Algeria trilogy, which traced the poverty and awakening of a colonised people: La grande maison ("The Big House," 1952), L'Incendie ("The Fire," 1954), and Le métier à tisser ("The Loom," 1957). His support for Algerian independence brought expulsion by the French authorities in 1959, and he settled in France, where fellow writers interceded on his behalf. Across half a century he published some thirty-seven volumes of novels, poems, short stories, and works for children, and taught at the Sorbonne and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Crowned with the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 1994, he died at La Celle-Saint-Cloud on the second of May 2003. He remains the grand seigneur of French-language Algerian letters, a bridge of words between two shores of the Mediterranean. May his name be honored.