El-Mahdi Acherchour

(Algeria, 1973) was invited to come to the Netherlands by Stichting Amsterdam Vluchtstad in 2005. The Dutch translation of his second novel Pays d’aucun mal (2008), will appear in January 2009. Pays d’aucun mal is a subdued chronicle of an exile returning to the village of his birth. There he returns to the people he used to know, with their 1001 stories, some of which can only be told from behind a door. Acherchour's prose is poetic and mysterious; his characters often live in a dreamworld in which absurd and mythical things happen. Acherchour lives in the Netherlands and has written two volumes of poetry and two novels.