International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. November's nation is Morocco.

We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore. 

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning Moroccan authors with some details about them. The bolded fiction titles are available through your Santa Fe Public Library.

For disability accommodations, please contact Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested Authors:

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun was born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Republica, El País, and Panorama.

His novels include The Sacred Night (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt), Corruption, and The Last Friend. Ben Jelloun won the 1994 Prix Maghreb, and in 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light

Youssef Fadel

The author, screenwriter and producer was born in 1949 in Morocco.

He taught French for 20 years, and retired in 1999 to write for television, cinema, and theater as well as 10 novels including A Shimmering Red Fish Swims With Me, A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me and A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me, all available on Hoopla.

Laila Lalami

For disability accommodations, please contact Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

For disability accommodations, please contact Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

The Rabat, Morocco native is the author of five books, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into 20 languages.  She lives in Los Angeles.

Nedjma

The author is an observant Muslim woman in her forties living in the Maghreb region using a pseudonym.

An autobiographical erotic novel, The Almond challenges Muslim fundamentalist views on a woman’s place in society and the role of sex in an individual’s life.

Leila Slimani

Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2018, for which she became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt.

Her other books include Adèle, Sex and Lies, and the No. 1 international bestsellers In the Country of Others and Watch Us Dance, which are the first and second parts of a trilogy of novels based on her family’s roots in revolutionary Morocco.

Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she divides her time between France and Portugal.

Abdellah Taïa

In 1973, Taïa was born in the public library of Rabat in Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old.

He writes in French and has published eight books now widely translated, including Le jour de roi (King’s Day), which was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. His 2016 novel is Infidels is available as an ebook.

An adaptation of his novel L'Armée du salut (The Salvation Army) was his first feature film, released in 2014, screened at major festivals around the world, and hailed by the New York Times as giving "the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist." That is available as a DVD.

Taïa made history in 2006 by coming out in his country, where homosexuality is illegal. His commitment to the defense of homosexuals in Muslim countries has made him one of the most prominent Arab writers of his generation. He has lived in Paris since 1998.