Algeria (1929–89)

Writes in French, Algerian Arabic

Kateb Yacine is a central reference in Algerian and North African Literature, particularly famous for his avant-garde novel Nedjma (1956). Yacine was born in 1926 in Constantine,  in Eastern Algeria, into a family of poets and lawyers. He went to the traditional koranic school for a short time then was educated in the French colonial school. 8 May 1945 was a turning point in his life. Because of his participation in anticolonial protests, he was jailed, and his mother was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Expelled from high school, he bega nto publish poems, give talks, and work as a journalist for the newspaper Alger républicain. After the death of his father in 1950, Yacine fled to France for a long exile. Subsisting on odd jobs, and reading modern novelists such as Joyce and Faulkner, he wrote his first play Le Cadavre encerclé in 1953, then his most famous novel, Nedjma, in 1956. He traveled throughout Europe during the Algerian revolution (1954–1962), published a second novel, Le Polygone étoilé, then returned to independent Algeria in 1970, where he led a popular theater group in Algerian Arabic. After his death in 1989, Kateb Yacine’s name has above all become associated with his novel Nedjma, a text about love and revolt written in an innovative style and a complex structure.