The world
is made of small fires.

Born in Tunis, raised between Marseille and Cairo, I came to writing the way most of us come to anything that matters — late, and with resistance.

My first novel, Atlas of Small Fires, asked what a woman inherits when the country she comes from is a language. It has since been translated into eleven languages, none of them mine.

Today I split my weeks between a writing room in Paris and a long table in Tunis. I teach one seminar a year. The rest of the time, I try to listen.