Abdellah Taïa
Abdellah Taïa عبد الله الطايع
Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language. He has published eight novels. Taïa became the first openly gay Arab writer in 2006,[and as of 2014 he remains the only openly homosexual Moroccan writer or filmmaker. Taïa was born in 1973 in Rabat, Morocco. He grew up in Hay Salam, a neighborhood of Salé, a town near Rabat. His family was poor. He had nine siblings. He first came into contact with literature through his father's job at the library.
Translated Titles by Abdellah Taïa
Paris, summer of 2010. Zahira is a Moroccan prostitute late in her career whose generosity is her way of defying her humiliation and misery. Her friend Aziz, a male prostitute, admires her and emulates her. Aziz is transitioning from his past as a man into the womanhood of his future, and asks Zahira to help him choose a name for himself as a woman. Motjaba is an Iranian revolutionary, a refugee in Paris, a gay man fleeing his country at the end of his rope, who finds refuge for a few days with Zahira. And then there is Allal, Zahira's first love, who comes to Paris years later to save their love. The world of A Country for Dying is a world of dreamers, of lovers, for whom the price of dreaming is one they must pay with their flesh. Writes Taïa, 'So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future.
Set in Salé, Morocco the hometown Abdellah Taia fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone.