Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur maghrébin?

This study understands authorship as a multidimensional and complex discourse which is shaped by several agents of the literary field, namely authors as well as editors, readers, journalists and others. Using the example of Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra and Kebir Ammi, authors of North African origin, strategies of authorial self-fashioning are compared to strategies applied by other agents of the literary field, each of them reflecting different interests. Khadra, Djebar and Ammi present themselves as global authors, negating those classifications pinning their work to a specific cultural background and thus neglecting the literary value of their work. In public discourse, however, they find themselves confronted with all sorts of labels, promoting the sale of their works but at the same time not being able to describe their individual literary strategies. The model presented in this study defines authorship as a dynamic discourse constantly defined and redefined by the author in reaction to those authorial images that are created by other agents of the literary field.