Editing Mohammed Dib (section)

==Life==
Dib was born in [[Tlemcen]] in [[Algeria]], near the border with [[Morocco]], into a middle-class family which had descended into poverty. After losing his father at a young age, Dib started writing poetry at 15. At the age of 18 he started working as a teacher in nearby [[Oujda]] in Morocco. In his twenties and thirties he worked in various capacities as a weaver, teacher, accountant, interpreter (for the French and British military), and journalist (for newspapers including ''Alger Républicain'' and ''Liberté'', an organ of the [[Algerian Communist Party]]). In 1952, two years before the [[Algerian revolution]], he married a French woman, joined the [[Algerian Communist Party]] and visited France. In the same year he published his first novel [[La Grande Maison]] (The Great House). Dib was a member of the ''Generation of '52'' — a group of Algerian writers which included [[Albert Camus]] and [[Mouloud Feraoun]].

In 1959, he was expelled from Algeria by the French authorities for his support for Algerian independence, and also because of the success of his novels (which depicted the reality of life in colonial Algeria for most Algerians). Instead of moving to [[Cairo]] as many Algerian nationalists had, he decided to live in France, where he was allowed to stay after various writers (including Camus) lobbied the French government. From 1967 he lived mainly in [[La Celle-Saint-Cloud]] near [[Paris]].

From 1976 to 1977 Dib was teacher at the [[University of California, Los Angeles|University of California at Los Angeles]]. He also was a professor at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]] in Paris. In his later years he often travelled to [[Finland]], which was a setting for some of his later novels. He died at La Celle-Saint-Cloud on 2 May 2003. In a tribute, the then French Culture Minister [[Jean-Jacques Aillagon]] said that Dib was "a spiritual bridge between Algeria and France, between the north and the Mediterranean."