Critically acclaimed writer Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she continues to live and work. Author of eleven poetry collections, several artists’ books, and a collection of essays, she is a poet and a translator. In her multidisciplinary work, she frequently collaborates with musicians, visual artists, and choreographers with whom she experiments with new forms of writing and creates live performances.
Her poetry has been translated into thirty languages and widely published, and her books have been published in Spanish, Italian, and Bulgarian. As a translator, she mainly translates from Arabic and English into French.
Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the National Translation Award in Poetry. Her books in English include The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems (Pleiades Press, 2020, translated by Marilyn Hacker) and Solio (Seagull Books, 2024, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson).
Her most recent publications in French, her principal written language, include J’habite en movement, 2001–2021 (Éditions Barzakh, 2023), Stations (Éditions Chèvre-feuille étoilée, 2023) and Pente raide, with Marin Fouqué (Actes Sud, 2025).
While she holds a degree from the Faculty of Medicine of Algiers, in her career she has privileged her literary craft over the practice of medicine.
She is known for exploring themes such as memory and transmission, lost genealogies, borders, languages, identities, and trauma. During her time at the Whitney Humanities Center as a Franke Visiting Fellow, she will be working on a new project called “Archeology of Wounds and Identities,” exploring the shadows of postcolonial Algeria and addressing the invisible remnants of war and resistance whose echoes shape today’s multiple fragmentations and violence.
