Djebar, Assia

Assia Djebar, born as Fatima-Zohra Imalayène, was a French-speaking Algerian author born in 1936 in Cherchell, a small coastal town in western Algeria. Her father was a teacher at the local French school she attended as a young girl. Unlike most Algerian girls, the young Fatima was encouraged to study, and she was often almost the only girl, and the only Muslim, in the classroom. In 1954, she became the first Algerian woman to study at an école normale supérieure in Paris.