Louisa Yousfi

Louisa Yousfi (1988, France) is a journalist and literary critic. She is the author of Rester barbare (La Fabrique, 2022), a work in which she takes up the motif of “barbarism” borrowed from the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine to offer both a political and literary account of the barbaric (re)becoming of Blacks and Arabs in France. More recently, she contributed to the collective work Contre la littérature politique (with Pierre Alferi, Nathalie Quintane, Leslie Kaplan, Tanguy Viel and Volodine, La Fabrique, 2024).

Her residency project is devoted to writing a work of fiction based on a Franco-Algerian family’s experience of the death of their father, a narrative that she will work to bring into contact with writing traditions other than the testimonial form or the archival document, and with a language carried by a radical syncretism. The story is about lost tales, secret inheritance, spiritual biology, intergenerational telepathy between a people of indigenous ghosts and their descendants engaged in a series of “Herculean tasks” in an increasingly hostile world.