Abdellah Taïa became a writer by accident. While keeping a diary to improve his French at college, the novelist and filmmaker found a voice and style that would result in his first novel, Mon Maroc (2000). In the two decades since, Taïa—who now lives in Paris—has continued to draw on his experiences growing up in Morocco in works like An Arab Melancholia (2008) and his most recent novel, Vivre à ta lumière (2022). 

In 2013, Taïa made Salvation Army, a movie adapted from his novel of the same name, which featured the first gay protagonist in Arab cinema and drew on Taïa's own life experience. As the first Moroccan novelist to come out as gay, Taïa became a lodestar for a generation of queer Moroccans. They, in turn, have now inspired Taïa: He is about to release his second feature film, Cabo Negro, which was prompted by two young gay Moroccans that Taïa follows on Instagram.

Aida Alami: To what extent is your writing autobiographical?

Abdellah Taïa: My writing comes from life. I was born and raised in a poor and large family—I am child number eight—and I have always been fascinated by other people, my parents, my brothers, my sisters. I am very attached to them, their ways of telling stories, of lying, of shouting, of distrusting each other. Of course, they understood absolutely nothing about my homosexuality. They witnessed the hell that society put me through, but they didn’t protect me. The writer that I have become comes from this naked, poor, extreme, sometimes beautiful and often poetic reality. It is a writing that starts from my “I” and immediately goes beyond it, to an idea bigger than my little “I.”