Zineb Mekouar

Zineb Mekouar was born in Casablanca in 1991 and has lived in Paris since 2009. After graduating from Sciences-Po and HEC Paris, she worked in strategy consulting and then in the tech sector, assisting start-ups on public affairs issues. Committed to causes that affect the living together, the themes dear to her heart are: the figure of the foreigner in the city, gender equality and the relationship between childhood and adulthood. She has been writing since she was a child and fell into literature through poetry. She lived in Florence for a year and has since returned to Italy regularly. Her first novel, La Poule et son Cumin, published in March 2022 by JC Lattès, collection La Grenade, is one of the finalists for the Goncourt du premier roman 2022 and is on the Académie Goncourt’s “coups de cœur de l’été 2022” list.

After writing a first novel, La Poule et son Cumin (JC Lattès, collection La Grenade), which deals with the emancipation of women on both sides of the Mediterranean, as well as the tension in France around the figure of the foreigner, Zineb Mekouar wishes, for her second novel, to tackle the themes of the place of man within Nature and the vulnerability of childhood, particularly in its relationship to maternal love.

In this sense, the idea of this second novel would be a back-and-forth between the theme of ecology and that of bruised maternal love. The plot takes place in Morocco, and we follow a young boy, but also his grandfather, his mother and his father. We witness a back-and-forth between country and city, between nature and culture, between beauty and pain. A range of emotions – life, in short.