Her Life
By the time she was born, her father had already been imprisoned after the 1945 riots. When the Algerian war broke out in 1954, her family home in Tunisia became a central meeting point for resistance fighters allied to the Algerian People’s Party including her father and cousins. After independence, in 1962, the family returned to Algeria, where Ahlam was sent to the country’s first Arabic-language school.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she became one of the first Algerian Arabic writers, broadcasting her poetry on national radio to support her family due to her father’s ill-health. She earned a B.A. in Arabic Literature from the University of Algiers in 1973, and also published her first poetry collection, Ala’ Marfa Al Ayam (the harbour of days).
In 1982, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris (her thesis was published by L’Harmattan as Algerie, Femmes et l’Ecriture), where she had moved in the late 1970s. She married a Lebanese journalist and moved to Beirut, where she published her first novel, Memory in the Flesh (Zakirat al Jassad) in 1993. To date, it has sold over a million copies across the Arabic-speaking world. It was translated into English by the American University in Cairo Press in 2000, after winning the 1998 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Ahlem Mosteghanemi currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon with her husband and has 3 children.
Read more about this topic: Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Have a care over my people. You have my people—do you that which I ought to do. They are my people.... See unto them—see unto them, for they are my charge.... I care not for myself; my life is not dear to me. My care is for my people. I pray God, whoever succeedeth me, be as careful of them as I am.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“It is not growing like a tree
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Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)