Ben Jelloun writes in French — a deliberate political and aesthetic choice for many Maghrebi writers of his generation — but his fiction is set inside Moroccan and Tunisian Arab life and his work is widely translated into Arabic. The Sand Child (1985) and its sequel The Sacred Night (1987), which won the Goncourt, tell the story of a Moroccan girl raised as a boy.
Recurring themes
gender disguise in the Maghreb
the immigrant in France
political prison
the inheritance of the colonial language
Selected works
- 1976Solitaire
- 1985The Sand Child
- 1987The Sacred Night
- 1994Corruption
- 2001This Blinding Absence of Light
- 2006Leaving Tangier