Esteemed writer and academic Abdelfattah Kilito was born in 1945 in Rabat, Morocco.

His lecture titled Thou Shalt Not Translate Me, followed on from the topic of his well-known book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language ( Sysracuse University Press, 2002).  In his work Kilito '. . . disrupts dominant modes of Arabic literary scholarship and challenges us . . . to reexamine contemporary notions of translation, bilingualism, postcoloniality, the pedagogy of world literature, and the discipline of comparative literature."*

Kilito studied at the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences in Rabat and obtained his doctorate on the narrative and cultural patterns in the works of Alhmdani and AlHariri from the new University of Sorbonne in 1982. He has been a Professor of Arts at Mohamed V University, Rabat, since 1968 and Visiting Professor at several European and American universities, including the University of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, Princeton University and Harvard University. Kilito has received several literary awards among which are the Great Moroccan Award (1989); Atlas Award (1996); French Academy Award (1996); Sultan Al Owais Prize, Criticism & Literature Studies (2006-06). He is the author of both fiction and literary criticism with some of his works translated into other languages including English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Works (selected):
La Querelle des images, Casablanca, Editions Eddif, 1995.
La Langue d’Adam;Casablanca, Ed. Toubkal, 1995.
En quête, Montpellier, Editions Fata Morgana, 1999.
Le Cheval de Nietzsche, Editions Le Fennec, 2007.
Les Arabes et l’art du récit, Editions Sindbad-Actes Sud, 2009.
Dites-moi le songe, Editions Sindbad-Actes Sud, 2010.

* Quoted from the Translator's Introduction to Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language by Waïl S. Hassan, Syracuse University Press, 2002

October 2010