A former Board Member of AFAC and an Algerian novelist. Born in 1956, he has worked as a professor at the University of Oran, teaching Critical Thinking and Cultural Analysis, and a professor at the University of Paris in the department of Women’s Studies. At the start of his literary career, Zaoui chose to write in the Arabic language to counterbalance that dominance of francophone works produced in his home country. His first collection of short stories, And the Waves Come Surging,(1981) published in Damascus, Syria and reprinted two years later, brought him to the immediate attention of an Arabic-reading public. His works consist of ten novels, written half in French and half in Arabic, as well as two collections of short stories.