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| TAHAR BEN JELLOUN
Born in Fez, Morocco to a shopkeeper and his wife in December of 1944, Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of North Africa's most successful post-colonial writers. Winner of France's Prix Goncourt, Ben Jelloun moved at eighteen from Fez to Tangier where he attended a French high school until enrolling at the Universite Mohammed V in Rabat in 1963. It was at the university where Ben Jelloun's writing career began. Exposed to the journal "Soufflés (Breaths )" as well as the journal's founder, poet Abdellatif Laabi, Ben Jelloun completed his first poems, publishing his first collection, "Hommes Sous Linceul de Silence" , in 1971. After completing his Philosophy studies in Rabat, in 1971, Ben Jelloun immigrated to France. In France, he attended the Universite de Paris, receiving his Ph.D. in psychiatric social work in 1975. Along with providing material for his dissertation, "La Plus Haute des Solitudes", Ben Jelloun draws upon his experience as a psychotherapist for his creative writing. His second novel, "La Reclusion Solitaire" (later "Solitaire" ), is a fictionalized account of some of his patients' dysfunction which was written in 1976. Between 1976-1987 Ben Jelloun was regularly published and received awards, but it was not until his novel "L'Enfant de Sable", (later translated as "The Sand Child" ) that he became well-known and recognized, with all of his novels since "The Sand Child" being translated into English. The sequel to "L'Enfant de Sable" , "La Nuit Sacree" or "The Sacred Night" is the work for which he received his most notable award, the Prix Goncourt in 1987. Ben Jelloun now lives in Paris with his wife, Aicha, and his daughter, Merieme.
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