Assia Djebar is considered as a major woman writer in Maghreb. By the time she was thirty, she had written four novels in French. In 1962, she abandoned fiction writing in French and devoted herself the teaching history at the University of Algiers. During the ensuing twelve years, she tried to tackle the problem of the transition from writing in French to writing in Arabic. She found a partial solution to this problem in the cinema with her film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, which was awarded the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Biennal 1979. In 1980 Assia published a volume of short stories dealing with the lives of contemporary urban Algerian women: Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartemen. Assia Djebar’s work has been known to the English reader primarily through the translation of her first novel La Soif (1957) under the title of The Mischief. L’amour, la fantasia, translated as Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade was published in 1985.
