Mohamed Choukri

Who was Mohamed Choukri?

Mohamed Choukri, born on July 15, 1935 and died on November 15, 2003, was a Moroccan author and novelist who is best known for his internationally acclaimed autobiography For Bread Alone, which was described by the American playwright Tennessee Williams as 'A true document of human desperation, shattering in its impact'.

Choukri was born in 1935, in Ayt Chiker, a small village in the Rif mountains, in the Nador province. He was raised in a very poor family. He ran away from his tyrannical father and became a homeless child living in the poor neighborhoods of Tangier, surrounded by misery, prostitution, violence and drug abuse. At the age of 20, he decided to learn how to read and write and became later a schoolteacher. His family name "Choukri" is connected to the name Ayt Chiker which is the Berber tribe cluster he belonged to before fleeing hunger to Tangiers. It is most likely that he adopted this name later in Tangiers, because in the rural Rif family names were rarely registered.

In the 1960s, in the cosmopolitan Tangier, he met Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams. His first writing was published in 1966