Kaouther Adimi

Born in 1986 in Algiers, Kaouther Adimi is a writer, playwright and screenwriter. After her first two books, Des ballerines de papicha (Vocation Prize, 2011)) and Des pierres dans ma poche (Stones in my Pocket), she enjoyed major success with Nos richesses (Our Riches – Renaudot Prize for young adult fiction), published by Le Seuil in 2017, an evocation of the legendary bookseller and publisher Edmond Charlot. Her fourth novel, Les petits de Décembre (December’s Children – Young Adults’ Metis Novel Award) appeared in 2019.

Her work mixes archives and fiction, reality and imagination, appropriating places to transform them, exhuming forgotten stories to put them back into narrative.

Kaouther Adimi contributes to numerous magazines and writes for the theatre and cinema.

At Villa Medici, she is working on her fifth novel, Au vent mauvais, in which, through the intertwined destinies of three characters, she paints a great fresco of Algeria, spanning almost a century, from colonisation to the struggle for independence, up to the summer of 1992, when the country plunged into civil war. Au vent mauvais will be published in September 2022 by Éditions du Seuil.

Directly inspired by her residency at Villa Medici, Kaouther Adimi has imagined Le paon rose (The Pink Peacock), a tale written for France Inter’s “OLI” programme, set to music for the Nuit blanche (November 2021) by Hèctor Parra and Imma Santacreu.

 

 

Image: © Daniele Molajoli