Yasmina Khadra

Mohammed Moulessehoul (محمد مولسهول; born 10 January 1955), better known by the pen name Yasmina Khadra (ياسمينة خضراء), is an Algerian author living in France, who writes in French.

One of the most famous Algerian novelists in the world, he has written almost 40 novels, and has published in more than 50 countries.

Khadra has often explored Algerian and other Arab countries' civil wars, depicting Muslim conflicts and reality, the attraction of radical Islamism to those alienated by the incompetence and hypocrisy of politicians, and conflicts between East and West.

In his several writings on the Algerian war, he has exposed the regime and the fundamentalist opposition as the joint guilty parties in the country's tragedy.

Moulessehoul was born in 1955 in Kénadsa, in the Algerian Sahara.

His mother, of nomadic origins, was her tribe's "chief storyteller".

His father, initially a nurse, joined the Algerian National Liberation army, as Algeria began to fight for independence from France.

He became an officer, wounded in 1958.

Parents sent their three sons, Mohammed aged nine and later his two younger brothers, to the cadet school of Revolution in El Mechouar Palace, Tlemcen.

Khadra describes the beginning of his passion for writing in his autobiography entitled The Writer, in this way he was able to keep privacy that he missed in the cadet dormitories.

At first, he wanted to be a poet in the Arabic language, but met a professor of French origin.

While at military school, at age 18, he finished his first volume of short stories, which was to appear eleven years later as Houria (1984).

At age 23, Khadra graduated from the Cherchell Military Academy (AMC), and joined the armed forces as a second lieutenant.

He has published three collections of short stories and three novels under his real name between 1984 and 1989.

In the early nineties, as a commander in the special forces, he was stationed at the Algerian-Moroccan border and in Oran Province, during the military deployment against Islamic fundamentalists, AIS and GIA.

He suffered three nervous breakdowns, escaped two ambushes and was three times forced to land in a helicopter.

In order to avoid a 1988 regulation, obliging soldiers to submit any written works to a military censorship board, Khadra published his further works under different pseudonyms, including 'Commissaire Llob'.

Brahim Llob is also the name of the protagonist in a series of detective novels – the incorruptible, increasingly helpless police detective, who uncovers the grievances of Algerian society, including corruption and cliquism, and as a result, gets between the frontlines of the Islamists and the powerful elite.

Following the publication of his first two books, Khadra could only get published abroad.

To bypass the censorship, his wife signed his publishing contracts; in homage he later took as his pen name her first two names – Yasmina Khadra ("green jasmine blossom").

Together with his earlier books, Le Dingue au bistouri (1990) and La Foire des enfoirés (1993), they meet the formal criteria of the French roman noir subgenre.

In the final volume, the protagonist is discovered as the author behind the pseudonym Yasmina Khadra, is suspended from service, and dies.

Khadra himself managed to escape the same fate.

In 1997, Khadra published the detective novel Morituri (Eng. 2003), which was to bring him international recognition.

Together with volumes Double Blank (1998, Eng. 2005) and Autumn of the Phantoms (1998, Eng. 2006), they form a trilogy, which portrays the Algerian Civil War and its background in a way that is both authentic and interesting.

He has written these novels with a European (French) readership in mind as they focus on the psychological and social causes of Islamic fundamentalism using precise documentary detail and emotional intensity.

He describes, from the perspective of Inspector Llob, Algerian everyday life and its omnipresent violence – bombings, corruption and the lack of economic prospects for large parts of the population.

With these novels, he has succeeded in anchoring the genre detective novel in Algerian literature.

In 2000, he quit the army to concentrate on literature and went with his family into exile in France via Mexico.

Khadra settled in Aix-en-Provence.

In 2001, he published an autobiography entitled The Writer (L'Écrivain), in which he wrote about his life as a soldier and as a writer, receiving 'Médaille de vermeil' award from the French Academy.

That same year, he revealed his true identity.

In respect for his wife, who had laid the economic basis for the new beginning in France through trips and negotiations with publishers, he decided to keep the pen name.

His pseudonym posed initially a problem and rumours, from a public point of view it was a sensation:

"The woman who had written several well-received novels in French and who had as a result been clasped to the Gallic literary bosom as a writer who would, finally, give an insight into what Arab women were really thinking, turned out to be a man called Mohammed Moulessehoul. And not just a man, but an Algerian army officer with three decades of military experience behind him. And not just an army officer, but one who had led a struggle against armed Islamist radicals and who, as a result, faced opprobrium in the French media for being tainted with the blood of civilians killed in brutal oppression by the north African state."

One of French critics noted eventually however: "A he or a she? It doesn't matter. What matters is that Yasmina Khadra is today one of Algeria's most important writers".

Although Khadra lives in France, he does not allow himself to be absorbed by the western point of view, but rather advocates getting to know and understanding.

His Algerian trilogy was followed in 2002 by The Swallows of Kabul (Eng. 2004), in which action takes place in 1998's Afghanistan.

The novel depicts the dictatorship of the Talibans and the condition of the Afghan woman.

Okacha Touita adapted and directed the film under the same title in 2004.