The discussion will be conducted in French. Places are free of charge and must be reserved on Eventbrite.

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Wassyla Tamzali was born in Béjaïa, Algeria, on July 10, 1941, to an Algerian father and a Spanish mother.  Her father came from a family of notables, merchants and industrialists; her mother arrived in Algeria at the age of 4 as part of the wave of Spanish economic emigration in 1920. In 1967 she was admitted to the Algiers bar, one of the first female lawyers, and in 1979 she joined the international ranks as a poster girl for the gender discrimination program at UNESCO (Paris). She represented UNESCO at the major international conferences on women held in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), and in 1996 was appointed director of UNESCO's program for the promotion of the status of women in the Mediterranean.  In 2002, she moved back to Algiers, without leaving the international arena of feminist struggles. On March 8, 2012, along with 7 other Arab women, she initiated the Arab Women's Call for Dignity and Equality. In 2015, the first example of cultural patronage in Algeria, she founded and directs Les Ateliers Sauvages. A center for contemporary creation and artist residencies in the heart of Algiers. Les Ateliers Sauvages will be the respectable, and the synthesis of her political aspirations and experiences, notably feminist, human and artistic.

Alice Kaplan visited Algeria for the first time in 2011 to do research on Albert Camus’s The Stranger.  Discovering the places where he wrote his novel and the places he describes in the novel, her passion for Camus was nearly eclipsed by her love for the country. Looking for « The Stranger », Maison Atlas : roman ; States of Plague (with Laura Marris), and soon to be published, Seeing Baya : Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris, 1947, are the result of over ten years of work on Algerian art and literature.  With Elisabeth Leuvrey and Abed Abidat, she helped found La MaisonDAR, a creative residence in the central Algiers.  For the « Field of Possibilities » projet, she meets regularly with a group of young Algerian women to explore American novels.  She considers Wassyla Tamzali’s Une éducation Algerienne one of the essential books for her understanding of Algeria.

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