Rabia Djelti

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Rabia Djelti (born 1954) is an Algerian writer who writes in Arabic and French and teaches literature at the University of Algiers. She was born on August 5, 1954, in Nedroma. She attended primary school in Morocco and secondary school in Oran (1969–1975). From an early age she loved French literature, discovering Baudelaire and Victor Hugo in her father’s library and began translating her favorite books into Arabic. She earned a literature degree at the University of Oran in 1979 and a doctorate in Damascus in 1990. After marrying Amin Zaoui, she taught at the University of Oran until the early 1990s. Because of the Algerian Civil War, they moved to France in 1995 and returned in 2000. She first worked as a journalist, then began writing poetry in Arabic in 1981. Her best-known poetry collections are Murmures du secret (2002) and Qui est-ce dans le miroir (2003), translated into French by Abdellatif Laâbi and Rachid Boudjedra. In 2002 she won the Abu Dhabi Arabic Literature Prize for her poetry and novels. In 2010 she began writing novels, including Le trône émaillé (2013) and Nostalgie à la menthe (2015). She has said that her poems each tell a story, but she only started writing novels in 2010. She is married to Amin Zaoui, and their daughter Lina Doran is a singer-songwriter.