Abdelouahab Aissaoui

Abdelouahab Aissaoui is an Algerian novelist born in 1985 in Tébessa. He is one of the most significant younger voices in Algerian Arabic literature, writing in Modern Standard Arabic about Algerian history and identity. He studied Arabic literature and has worked as a journalist. Aissaoui published his debut novel Fadhihat al-Rajul al-Nabih (The Scandal of the Upright Man) in 2012. His second novel, Al-Mahkama al-Isbarttiya (The Spartan Court), won the IPAF in 2020. Set in 19th-century Algeria, it depicts the historical experience of Algerians under French colonial rule through three interconnected narratives, drawing on the genre of the historical court drama to examine colonialism, resistance, and cultural destruction. The Spartan Court was praised for its historical scope, its use of archival sources, and its reconstruction of a period of Algerian history that fiction has rarely engaged with in Arabic. The novel brought Aissaoui significant international attention. Aissaoui is part of a generation of younger Arab writers engaging with the colonial period through historical fiction, using literary form to recover suppressed histories and challenge dominant narratives about the Arab past.