Faten Fazaâ ( ar, فاتن الفازع) is a Tunisian novelist and the first woman to write a novel in Tunisian Arabic.

Biography

Faten Fazaâ was born and raised in Tunis, Tunisia. She is the daughter of the well-known Tunisian writer and scriptwriter Tahar Fazaa. Following a difficult marriage and divorce, Fazaâ began writing on Facebook in 2013 or 2014, quickly amassing followers who enjoyed her writing and encouraged her. She began to write a screenplay, but her writing was interrupted when she emigrated to Germany. It was after the death of her grandmother, who had raised her, that Fazaa began to write her first novel, ''ʾAsrār ʿāʾilīyah'', as a way of dealing with her grief and connecting with her grandmother. This success took the author by surprise: she recounts that she had never planned to write, and in school she wasn't extraordinary in the subject. She had expected to "sell 300 copies and be done with it." Her following novels were also successful: as of May 2020 she had sold a total of 30,000 books, and her most recent novel's initial run of 5,000 copies sold out is less than a month. Fazaâ has two children and currently lives in Germany.

''ʾAsrār ʿāʾilīyah'' (''Family Secrets'')

''Asrār ʿaʾilīyah'' was the first Tunisian Arabic novel written by a woman. It is part of a recent trend of Tunisian novels published in the vernacular language rather than

Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA), terms used mostly by linguists, is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; occasionally, it also refe ...

. The novel is semi-auto-biographical. It tells the story of Ghalia, a young mother of two who, in the first chapter, leaves her restrictive husband. She tries to reclaim her freedom and her enjoyment of life, but encounters severe difficulties along the way. In the course of her struggle, we meet several other characters—Ghalia's husband, her sister and disabled nephew, a very intelligent but disadvantaged woman who works as a prostitute, and others—many of whom talk directly to the reader, telling their stories in the first person. It was published in the spring of 2018; as of July 2020 it was in its thirteenth edition. The novel is "one of the highest-selling novels in Arabic," according to the Booksellers' Union in Tunisia.

Awards

* (2018) Derja Association Ali Douagi Prize (for ''ʾAsrār ʿāʾilīyah'') * (2019) Derja Association Abdelaziz Aroui Prize (for ''Wa min al-ḥubb mā fashala'') *(2020) Derja Association Ali Douagi Prize (for ''Sharaʿ al-ḥubb'')

Publications

* (2018) ''ʾAsrār ʿāʾilīyah'' ( (Family Secrets)) * (2019) ''Wa-min al-ḥubb mā fashal'' ( (Some Love Fails)) * (2020) ''Sharaʿ al-ḥubb'' ( (The Law of Love)) * (2021) ''Hysteria'' ()

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fazaa, Faten Living people Tunisian novelists 21st-century Tunisian women writers 21st-century Tunisian writers Tunisian writers in Tunisian Arabic Year of birth missing (living people)