Mohammed Dib Algeria

MOHAMMED DIB was born at Tlemcen in 1920. After working as a teacher (prior to the Second World War), he joined the paper Alger républicain, which he quit in 1951. He was expelled from Algeria in 1959 and later settled in the western Paris suburbs. His first work on French soil, Ombre Gardienne (1961) was warmly received by Louis Aragon and André Malraux. A professor at the University of California in 1974 and winner of the Prix Mallarmé for L'enfantjazz in 1998, Mohammed Dib's poetic universe resembles, on more than one count, an unexplored, underground, black continent. His last collections were Le coeur insulaire (2000) and L.A. Trip (2003), a novel in verse. Dib died at La Celle Saint-Cloud, near Paris, in 2003.