In Translation: Abdellah Taïa on Living in Your Light with David Ebershoff

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT May 6, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

This event has been canceled.

French-Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa is known for his bold, humanizing portraits of marginalized characters living in North Africa. His most recent novel, Living in Your Light, follows protagonist Malika from age seventeen to old age as she confronts and struggles against the vestiges of French rule following Morocco’s independence.

David Ebershoff, Vice President & Editor-in-Chief of Hogarth, Executive Editor at Random House, and author of The Danish Girl, will join Taïa for a conversation about the evolution of Moroccan queer literature and the importance of bringing translated literature into the mainstream. A signing will follow the event.

Featuring

Abdellah Taïa

Abdellah Taïa

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1973, Abdellah Taïa has written many novels in French, including Salvation Army (2006), Le Jour Du Roi (Prix de Flore, 2010), Infidels, translated into English by Alison Strayer (Seven Stories Press, 2016), and A Country for Dying, which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Emma Ramadan’s translation (Seven Stories Press, 2020). His most recent novel Le bastion des larmes was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt 2024 and won the Prix Decembre 2024. He is the director of two award-winning feature films, “Salvation Army” (2013) and “Cabo Negro” (2025). He lives in Paris.

Photo Credit: Abderrahim Annag
David Ebershoff

David Ebershoff

David Ebershoff is the editor in chief of Hogarth, an imprint of Random House. He’s edited books that have won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, History, and Biography and more than twenty-five New York Times bestsellers. He’s the author of the bestselling novels The 19th Wife, which was adapted for television, and The Danish Girl, which was made into an Oscar-winning film.

Featured Book

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Living in Your Light

By Abdellah Taïa

Published by Seven Stories Press

Translated by Emma Ramadan

PURCHASE

Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II.

It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.

In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa.

The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.

Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s mother: M’Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.