Mohammed Dib

Mohammed Dib was born on the twenty-first of July 1920 at Tlemcen, in north-western Algeria near the Moroccan border, the son of a shopkeeper of the old medina of Tlemcen, who died when Dib was ten. He was raised by his widowed mother in the textile-and-leather quarter of the medina.

He was placed at six at the Franco-Arabic primary school of Tlemcen and continued the French colonial secondary school at the Lycée Bouamama at Oujda across the Moroccan border, completing the baccalauréat there in 1938. He took further study at the Université d’Alger in Arabic literature and French letters between 1939 and 1942 but did not complete the licence.

He served in the Algerian Tirailleurs of the Free French Forces during the second European war as an interpreter on the Italian front in 1943 and 1944.

He took employment in 1945 as a primary-school teacher at Aïn Témouchent in western Algeria, as a railway clerk at Oran, as an accountant at the Tlemcen rug-weaving cooperative, and finally as a journalist at the Communist daily Alger Républicain at Algiers from 1950 to 1952.

He published in 1952 the novel La Grande Maison (The Big House) — the first volume of the Algeria trilogy — at the Paris house Le Seuil, then under the editorial direction of Paul Flamand. The novel chronicled the late-colonial Tlemcen tenement house of the Omar family of the medina across the colonial winters of the 1939–1942 period and was at the time the most prominent novel of pre-independence Algerian working-class life published in metropolitan France.

He completed the trilogy with L’Incendie (The Fire, 1954) and Le Métier à tisser (The Loom, 1957) — the latter two volumes following the Omar family through the early years of the Algerian War of Independence.

He was expelled from French Algeria in May 1959 by the French colonial administration for his support of the National Liberation Front, and lived the remainder of his life in France — at the Paris suburbs of La Celle-Saint-Cloud.

He published across the following forty-four years a further twenty-three novels — among them Qui se souvient de la mer (1962), Habel (1977), and the Nordic trilogy Les Terrasses d’Orsol (1985), Le Sommeil d’Ève (1989), Neiges de marbre (1990).

He was awarded the 1994 Grand Prix de la Francophonie of the Académie française — the first Algerian writer in French to receive the award.

He died at La Celle-Saint-Cloud on the second of May 2003, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the author of the Algeria trilogy.