14 Facts About Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi is an Algerian poet and writer.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman to write poetry and fiction in Arabic.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi has published four novels and six anthologies, and is best known for her 1993 novel Memory of the Flesh.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was released in 1947 and the family relocated to Tunis, Tunisia, where Mosteghanemi was born in 1953.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi's father continued his activism and support of Algerian independence.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi belonged to the first generation in Algeria that was able to study and write in Arabic, after more than a century of prohibition by the French.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi received her first degree in Literature from the University of Algiers.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was expelled from the Union of Algerian Writers for not conforming to the established political line.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi consequently pursued her doctoral studies in France, earning a PhD in sociology from Sorbonne University with her thesis, later published as Algerie, femmes et ecritures in 1985, about the representation of women in both Francophone and Arabic literature.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi said Algeria was never far from her mind.

In 1993, Ahlam Mosteghanemi settled in Lebanon and her first novel, Zakirat el Jassad, was published.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was able to break out of the linguistic exile into which French colonialism had relegated Algerian intellectuals.

In 2001, Ahlam Mosteghanemi established the Malek Haddad Literary Prize to encourage more Algerians to write in Arabic.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi married Lebanese journalist Georges El Rassi in Paris in 1976.