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, supporting start-ups on public affairs issues. Committed to social issues, 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’s been writing since she was a child, and fell into literature through poetry. She lived in Florence for a year and has been returning to Italy regularly ever since. Her first novel, La Poule et son Cumin, published in March 2022 by JC Lattès, La Grenade collection, was shortlisted for the Goncourt du premier roman 2022 and is on the Académie Goncourt’s “coups de cœur de l’été 2022” list. After writing her first novel, La Poule et son Cumin (JC Lattès, collection La Grenade), which tackled the emancipation of women on both sides of the Mediterranean, in Morocco, but also the tensions in France around the figure of the foreigner, Zineb Mekouar wanted to tackle the themes of man’s place in Nature and the vulnerability of childhood, particularly in its relationship with maternal love, in her second novel. 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. Set in Morocco, the story follows a young boy, his grandfather, his mother and his father. We witness a back-and-forth between country and city, nature and culture, beauty and pain. A palette of emotions – life, in short.