Moroccan author Driss El Khouri died yesterday in his home in Salé. He was 83.
Born in 1939, El Khoury worked first as a journalist and, in Casablanca, became close friends with influential Moroccan authors Muhammad Zafzaf and Mohamed Choukri. El Khoury joined the Moroccan Writers Union in 1968 and began publishing short stories in the 1970s. Like Zafzaf, El Khoury was interested in the lives of the marginalized and in pushing the boundaries of the short-story form.
El Khoury, as Khalid Lyamlahy notes above, was primarily influential as a journalist and short-story writer.
At a celebration of his work in 2004, Hassan Aourid said of Driss El Khoury that he was a writer “who belongs to all of us” and that his works were always close to Morocco’s deepest realities.
