As part of the “African Literature” series, Casa África welcomes Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa (pictured), one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Francophone literature. He will speak with Lydia Vázquez Jiménez, Professor of French Philology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and translator of much of his work—including “My Morocco” (winner of the Cálamo Prize), “The Red of the Tarbouche,” “The Salvation Army,” “An Arab Melancholy,” “The Day of the King,” and “Infidels”—to explore his creative journey.
Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) is an openly gay Moroccan writer and journalist who has lived in self-imposed exile in Paris since 1998. He studied French Literature in Rabat and in the mid-1990s moved to Geneva to continue his studies, which he completed at the Sorbonne in Paris. He currently works as a journalist for Le Monde.
In 2006, he publicly came out as gay in an interview with the political magazine Tel Quel, becoming the first Moroccan intellectual to do so. As a result, he was heavily criticized in Morocco. Taïa’s books not only deal with his life as a gay man in a homophobic environment, but also with the social experiences of the generation of Moroccans who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s.
An author of novels that explore identity, displacement, and sexuality from a poetic and deeply personal perspective, Taïa made the leap to film with “L’Armée du salut,” an adaptation of his own novel presented at the Venice Film Festival. His work, always at the intersection of literature and film, continues to grow, as demonstrated by the international premiere of his second feature film at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Casa África will host a meeting on June 2nd between Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa and his Spanish translator, Lydia Vázquez, as part of the “African Letters” program. Conceived as a dialogue between author and translator, the event will explore the literary trajectory of one of the most singular voices in contemporary African literature, marked by memory, exile, identity, and dissent.
The meeting will offer the public the opportunity to engage not only with the work of Abdellah Taïa, but also with the process of translation and circulation of contemporary African literatures.
Through the conversation with Lydia Vázquez, the event will explore how words travel between languages, contexts, and personal experiences to construct new forms of reading and cultural dialogue.
The event will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium at Casa África (Calle Alfonso XIII, 5, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas). Admission is free.
