Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Ahlam Mosteghanemi (Arabic: أحلام مستغانمي ) is an Algerian author and the first female Algerian author of Arabic-language works to be translated into English.
By the time she was born, Mosteghanemi's father had already been imprisoned after the 1945 riots. When the Algerian war broke out in 1954, her family home in Tunisia became a central meeting point for resistance fighters allied to the Algerian People’s Party including her father and cousins. After independence, in 1962, the family returned to Algeria, where Mosteghanemi was sent to the country’s first Arabic-language school.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she became one of the first Algerian Arabic writers, broadcasting her poetry on national radio to support her family due to her father’s ill-health. She earned a B.A. in Arabic Literature from the University of Algiers in 1973, and also published her first poetry collection, Ala’ Marfa Al Ayam (the harbour of days).
In 1982, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris (her thesis was published by L’Harmattan as Algerie, Femmes et l’Ecriture), where she had moved in the late 1970s.
She married a Lebanese journalist and moved to Beirut, where she published her first novel, Memory in the Flesh (Zakirat al Jassad) in 1993. To date, it has sold over a million copies across the Arabic-speaking world. It was translated into English by the American University in Cairo Press in 2000, after winning the 1998 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Ahlem Mosteghanemi currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon with her husband and has 3 children.
“The most beautiful novel is the one that starts with a sentence wholly unexpected by the reader who has lived through our storms and norms, and who might once have been the cause of our changing moods.”
“Nervously, I light a cigarette and chase through the smoke for the wounds that years have seared my soul, words whose fire has never been quenched by ink. Is paper a dustbin for the memory, a place where we always deposit the ash of the last cigarette of nostalgia, the remnants of the final disappointment? Which one of us lights up or stubs the other? I really do not know. Before you, I never wrote anything worth mentioning. Because of you, I put pen to paper.”
“How do you want us to tune the lens and our eyes are filled with tears”
“I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery" - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses)”
“There is no one truth. The truth is not a fixed point. It changes within us and change with us.”
“Searching For You In Other People's Faces =!!!”
“الأشياء الأجمل، تولد احتمالا... و ربما تبقى كذلك.”
“Before, I thought we could write about life only when we had recovered from our wounds; when we were able to touch old sores with a pen and not revive the pain; when we could look back free from nostalgia, madness, and a sense of grievance.But is this really possible? We are never completely cut off from our memory. Recollections provides the inspiration for writing, the stimulus for painting, and for some, the motivation even for death.”