Abdelaziz Errachidi

Abdelaziz Errachidi was born in 1978 in Zagora, on the edge of the Moroccan Sahara, and now lives in Agadir, where he is a professor of Arabic literature at Ibn Tofaïl University and director of the AlKassaba publishing house. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including the short story collections Alley of Death, Childhood of a Frog, and Sands of Pain, House Faces; the novel Nomads on the Cliff; the essay collection Foreigners at My Table; and The Kitchen of Love. His travel book Sindbad of Sahara won the UAE’s Ibn Battuta Prize.
His writing has also earned him the Union of Moroccan Writers’ Prize, the Acharika Arabic Prize, and the Sakyat Essawi Prize, and he was named to Beirut39, the Hay Festival’s selection of the most promising Arab writers under forty. Errachidi has held residencies at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland, Camac in France, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where he worked with translator Mbarek Sryfi.
The Sahara has been the wellspring of his work since the beginning — the landscape, oral traditions, and vanishing rural life of the region he grew up in shape Bedouins on the Edge as they have shaped nearly everything he has written. As Errachidi has said of his own process: “I write with my eyes.”