Assia Djebar

Djebar was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayène in colonial Algeria and became, in 1955, the first Algerian woman admitted to France's elite École Normale Supérieure. She left her studies to support the Algerian independence movement during the war against France, then turned to writing and, later, filmmaking as ways of recovering a history from which colonized women had been doubly silenced, by empire and by patriarchy alike.

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, published in 1985, wove her own girlhood together with archival accounts of the French conquest and interviews with women who had fought in the war of independence, all rendered in the French language she treated as both wound and tool. She taught for years in Algeria and the United States, was elected to the Académie française in 2005 (its first writer from the Maghreb) and died in Paris in 2015.