Tahar Ben Jelloun
Selected Works
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Ville ivre d'amour, 2019
Acrylique sur toile
Signée, datée et titrée au dos
130 x 97 cm
Tahar Ben Jelloun
De cet amour naîtra la poésie, 2019
Acrylique sur toile
Signée, datée et titrée au dos
92 x 73 cm
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Abouab, 2017
Acrylique sur toile
54 x 65 cm
Some of the works depicted are no longer available.
Biography
“Painting a city is a hazardous business. This is why I opted for “dream cities”, unrecognizable, but inhabited by mystery. The walls are straight, the roofs sometimes lean, life fits together there, behind the facades. I imagined cities as a romantic, baroque and dreamlike work. »
After attending a bilingual French-Moroccan primary school, he studied at the French high school in Tangier until the age of eighteen, then studied philosophy at the Mohammed V University in Rabat, where he wrote his first poems - collected in Men under the Shroud of Silence (1971). He then taught philosophy in Morocco.
But, in 1971, following the Arabization of the teaching of philosophy, he had to leave for France, not being trained for teaching in Arabic. He moved to Paris to continue his studies in psychology. From 1972 he wrote numerous articles for the daily newspaper Le Monde.
In 1975 he obtained a doctorate in social psychiatry. His writing will also benefit from his experience as a psychotherapist (La Réclusion Solitaire, 1976). In 1985, he published the novel L'Enfant de Sable which made him famous.
He won the Goncourt Prize in 1987 for La Nuit Sacrée, a sequel to L'Enfant de sable. He writes several educational works (such as Racism explained to my daughter, 1998, or Islam explained to children, 2002). He is regularly requested to speak in Moroccan, French and European schools and universities. In 2008, he was elected a member of the Académie Goncourt.
