Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) is an openly gay Moroccan writer who has lived in self-imposed exile in Paris since 1998. Taïa writes in French and has had works translated into Basque,[1] Dutch, English and Spanish.[2]
Taïa grew up in a family with 9 siblings in Salé, Morocco. He first came into contact with literature through his father, who was a janitor at the local library in Rabat. As a gay teenager, he was confronted with the homophobia and machismo in Moroccan society.
He studied French literature while living in Rabat. During the mid-1990s he left Morocco for Switzerland in order to study for a semester in Geneva. He later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.[3]
In 2007 he publicly came out of the closet in an interview with the literary magazine Tel Quel,[4] which created controversy in Morocco.[5]
Taïa's books deal with his life living in a homophobic society and have autobiographical background on the social experiences of the generation of Moroccans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s.[6]
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