Khadija Marouazi

It is Marouazi's fictional account of the so-called Years of Lead, a period of political repression in Morocco during the 1960s and 1980s.

The story is told by the main characters, Mouline and Leila, who both have been imprisoned and tortured for their political activities, and tells how they are trying to come to terms with these events after their release.

The narration changes between fictional past and present, between events that happened to Mouline and Leila inside the prison and outside, presenting descriptions of torture and the accusations by the judicial system.

Further, the publishers wrote: "Mouline and Leila describe their strategies for survival and resistance in lucid, often searing detail, and reassess their political engagements and the movements in which they are involved."

History of Ash was translated into English by Alexander E. Elinson, associate professor of Arabic and head of the Arabic program at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Upon this publication in 2023, the novel was shortlisted for the 2024 EBRD Literature Prize.

This prize is awarded annually to distinguish the "literary richness" of its operational regions, which includes some 40 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa.

The prize is shared by the writer and the translator, and funding for the prize worth €20,000 is provided by the member nations of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, in cooperation with the British Council.

History of Ash was also selected as one of the 10 best books by Arab authors in 2023 by The New Arab media outlet, writing that the novel "vividly echoes the reality of this period."

Further Moroccan works of fiction and non-fiction about the Years of Lead and the secret Tazmamart prison are Fatna El Bouih’s Talk of Darkness, Malika Oufkir and Michèle Fitoussi’s Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, Mohamed Raiss’s From Skhirat to Tazmamart: A Roundtrip Ticket to Hell, Ahmed Marzouki’s Tazmamart: Cell Number 10 and Aziz Binebine’s Tazmamart – Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison.

This period of the rule of King Hassan II of Morocco, from roughly the 1960s through the 1980s, was marked by state violence and repression against political dissidents and democracy activists.

History of Ash and other works about prisoners in North Africa, including Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and Salwa Bakr's The Golden Chariot, have been discussed by literary scholars as examples of Arab women writers' prison literature.

Khadija Marouazi (* 1961 in Marrakesh, Morocco) is a Moroccan human rights activist, writer and university lecturer for literature.

Member of several human rights organizations in Morocco, she is also known for her debut novel History of Ash, originally written in Arabic and published in English translation in 2023.

This fictional account of political repression during the so-called Years of Lead in Morocco and the traumatic effects on prisoners has been discussed by literary scholars as part of Arab women writers' prison literature.

Marouazi was born in Marrakesh in 1961 and lives in the Moroccan capital Rabat.

She is one of the founders of the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights (OMDH) and the general secretary of the non-governmental organization Mediator for the Study of Democracy and Human Rights (al-wasit min ajl al-dimuqratiya).

She is also a member of the scientific committee for the Moroccan magazines Dafatir al-sijjin (Prison Notebooks) and Majallat dirasat huquq al-insan (Journal for Human Rights Studies).

Further, Marouazi teaches literature in the Department of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Ibn Tofail University in Kenitra.

In 2000, her debut novel History of Ash (original title: سيرة الرماد, Sīrat al-ramād) was published by Afrique Orient publishers in Casablanca.