An Afternoon with Abdellah Taïa, Sahar Delijani, and Zain Khalid

From 1954 to 1999, three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying (Seven Stories Press, 2020). Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina. In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa. The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her. Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of history. To survive. To have a little space of her own. Malika is Taïa’s mother: M’Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

In 1973, Abdellah Taïa was born in the Public Library of Rabat in Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old. Acclaimed as both a novelist and filmmaker, he writes in French and has published eight books now widely translated, including Le jour de roi, which was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. An adaptation of his novel L’Armée du salut was his first feature film, released in 2014, screened at major festivals around the world, and hailed by the New York Times as giving “the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist.” Abdellah Taïa made history in 2006 by coming out in his country, where homosexuality is illegal. His commitment to the defense of homosexuals in Muslim countries has made him one of the most prominent Arab writers of his generation—both “a literary transgressor and cultural paragon,” according to Interview magazine. Taia has lived in Paris since 1998.

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Literary Hub, Jewish Currents, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Her second novel, For Every Person You Kill, is forthcoming from Melville House in Spring 2027.

Zain Khalid, named a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2024, is the author of the debut novel, Brother Alive. Brother Alive won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Khalid is also the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, n+1, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor at The Drift and a contributing editor at Bidoun.

This event is in English and is free. Please click here to RSVP.

Abdellah Taïa will also be participating in the PEN World Voices Festival, in the talk Mother Dearest: Understanding our Mothers with Gish Jen and Molly Jong-Fast on Thursday, April 30.

More info here.