Anouar Benmalek is a novelist, journalist, mathematician and poet, and author of the award-winning The Lovers of Algeria and The Child of an Ancient People, as well as many other books.
Benmalek, who fled to France in 1992 to escape Islamist death threats, holds both Algerian and French citizenship. Following the 1988 riots protesting government policies in Algeria and the subsequent crackdown, he became a co-founder of The Algerian Committee Against Torture and an editor of The Black Book of October, a collection of testimonies given by victims subjected to torture by the Algerian state.