Rashid Boudjedra was born in Aïn Beida, Algeria, in 1941. He interrupted his studies in the late 1950s to join the resistance to French rule and after being wounded, was sent first to Eastern Europe and then to Spain as a representative of the National Liberation Front. After a string of highly successful novels during the 1980s and early 1990s, which saw him compared to Faulkner and García Márquez, Boudjedra decided to stop writing in French in favour of Arabic.