Leïla Aouchal (born Liliane Hélène Roberte Constantin; 13 July 1936 – 21 April 2013) was a French-Algerian writer.

Life

She was born to a middle-class French family in

Caen Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,France, in 1936, and married an Algerian immigrant at the age of 19, moving with him to Algeria. Upon the country's 1962 achievement of independence, Aouchal became an Algerian citizen. Despite being raised as a Catholic, she gradually became "Algerianized"; she began to read the Koran, converted to Islam and avoided Christian festivals in Algeria. Aouchal died in Gonesse in 2013.

Works

In 1970, Aouchal published ''Une Autre Vie,'' an autobiographical account of her experience of integrating into Algerian society amidst a civil war. This would be her only work. Despite her brief writing career, she was cited as being included in the first generation of female Algerian writers using the

French language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...

(along with such names as Fadhma Aït Mansour and

Taos Amrouche Marie-Louise-Taos Amrouche (born 4 March 1913 in Tunis, Tunisia; died 2 April 1976 in Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire, France) was an Algerian writer and singer. In 1947, she became the first Algerian woman to publish a novel. Biography She was ...

). These individuals were born between 1882–1928, publishing their texts between 1960–1980. Common themes are the "self-discovery" of the authors, with texts set during the

Algerian War The Algerian War, also known as the Algerian Revolution or the Algerian War of Independence,( ar, الثورة الجزائرية '; '' ber, Tagrawla Tadzayrit''; french: Guerre d'Algérie or ') and sometimes in Algeria as the War of 1 November ...

and the evolution of the female condition during this time in the country.

References

20th-century French writers French autobiographers French emigrants to Algeria 20th-century Algerian women writers Algerian writers 1936 births 2013 deaths 20th-century French women writers Women autobiographers 21st-century Algerian people Converts to Sunni Islam from Roman Catholicism Algerian Muslims French Muslims Muslim writers Algerian writers in French {{Algeria-writer-stub