Tahar Ben Jelloun is an acclaimed Moroccan-born French novelist, poet, essayist, and intellectual. As a young man, Ben Jelloun spent time in a Moroccan army camp for taking part in a student demonstration. He sought exile in Paris in 1971 and has since become one of France’s most celebrated authors, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for The Sacred Night and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2004 for This Blinding Absence of Light.
Rita S. Nezami teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University, where her teaching and research interests include the rhetorics of global issues, creative nonfiction, visual rhetoric, and postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literatures. Northwestern University Press published her translation of Ben Jelloun’s By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring in 2016.
