Yasmina Khadra

Algeria's celebrated writer While training to become an army officer and in order to avoid military censors, he began publishing under his wife's name - Yasmina Khadra - in 1988. Now Algeria's most celebrated writer, translated in 25 languages, his books, the first in a trilogy, in English include 'Morituri, In the Name of God' (2000), set in the Algeria caught in the throes of civil war and religious radicalism, 'Wolf Dreams' (2004), and 'The Swallows of Kabul' (2004), a novel set in Afghanistan in the run-up to the attack of 11 September 2001 in which he sets out to describe the contemporary Orient, in particular the galvanising power of Islamic radicalism. The second in the trilogy, 'The Attack', a novel on Palestinian terrorism is published in 2006. The final part of the trilogy 'The Sirens of Baghdad' will be published in France - a portrait of a young Bedouin who grows to despise the American occupation of Iraq. His fiction may tell the truth. Yasmina Khadra is the pseudonym of Muhammad Moulessehoul who was born in Kenadsa in the Algerian Sahara, now lives in Aix-en-Provence.

Compiler: M. Nauman Khan