From 1997 to 2001, Yasmina Khadra was considered the only Arab woman from Algeria recording an insider’s view of the region—where political oppression, civil strife and terrorism was shredding the established “eastern” way of life—through novels like Morituri and Wolf Dreams. In 2001, the year that two collapsing towers in America gave a new definition to terror and the Arab world, Khadra, the world realised, was actually a man—Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former commandant of the Algerian army who had waged battles of his own and now wrote under his wife’s name to avoid military censorship.

“In the army, you use your head to wear a helmet, not to think, certainly not to write,” he says. “I was in the army for 36 years, since the age of nine when my father sent me to cadet school. I wrote eight books under my own name, not novels dealing with the real questions. The trouble started in 1988 when I began to get famous. I was told to submit future manuscripts to a censorship committee, which I found unacceptable. But I was determined to write.” At first he wrote under the pen name of Police Chief Llob, cloaking a hardhitting commentary on Algerian society as a crime novel. Almost a decade later, he took up his wife’s name.

Born in the Algerian Sahara in a tribe of poets and warriors, he has no doubt about where the writing gene came from. “My mother, a settled nomad, was well loved for her poetry and wisdom,” says Khadra, who has always written in French.

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