Mohammed Dib was born in 1920 in western Algeria in Tlemcen, a hometown to which he paid homage in his famous trilogy: La Grande Maison (1952), L’Incendie (1954) and Le Métier à tisser (1957). A schoolteacher for a time, then an accountant, translator, journalist at “Alger Républicain” and for the Communist Party organ “Liberté”, he was finally expelled from Algeria in 1959.

He settled in France and began his literary career. He was the first Maghreb writer to receive, in 1994, the Grand Prix de la Francophonie. And the one of whom Aragon said: “This man from a country that has nothing to do with the trees at my window, the rivers on my quays, the stones of our cathedrals, speaks with the words of Villon and Péguy”.