Mohamed Choukri

Mohamed Choukri was a Moroccan writer whose autobiographical fiction depicts poverty, migration, and life on the margins. His best-known work is For Bread Alone.

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For Bread Alone: Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical novel recounts childhood poverty, hunger, and survival in Morocco. This stark account of his early life became his best-known work.
Rif: A mountainous region of northern Morocco with a distinctive Amazigh cultural and linguistic heritage. Choukri was born there before his family moved south.
Paul Bowles: An American writer, composer, and translator who lived for decades in Tangier. Bowles translated For Bread Alone into English and helped introduce Choukri abroad.
Censorship in Morocco: State and institutional restrictions on expression in Morocco, varying across periods and media. For Bread Alone faced restrictions because of its sexual content and frank social detail.
The Tent: A collection of Arabic short stories by Mohamed Choukri. The stories extend his attention to marginalized lives beyond his autobiographical novel.
Tangier: A Moroccan port city at the Strait of Gibraltar, shaped by African, European, and Mediterranean connections. The city became the setting for much of Choukri’s life and writing.
Tennessee Williams: An American playwright known for A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie. Choukri’s memoir describes his friendship with Williams in Tangier.
Literary translation: The translation of creative writing while attending to style, meaning, and cultural context. Translation carried Choukri’s Arabic work to audiences beyond Morocco.
Jean Genet in Tangier: Mohamed Choukri’s memoir of encounters with French writer Jean Genet in Tangier. It turns Choukri’s literary life into a portrait of another outsider.
Moroccan Arabic: A group of Arabic varieties spoken in Morocco, also known as Darija. Choukri first wrote in Arabic, in a literary landscape shaped by local speech.