Mohamed Choukri was born in 1935 in Beni Chiker, a small village in the Berber Rif near Nador in Morocco.
Raised in a poor family, he fled at the age of 11 and became a street child from Tangier, where he lives in the slums of the city. At the age of 20, he decided to learn to read and write and become a teacher.
In 60 years, in the cosmopolitan Tangiers, he will meet Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams. He began to be published in 1966 (in Al-adab, monthly Beirut). His international success comes with the English translation, by Paul Bowles, Al-khoubz Al-Hafi (Le Pain nu, For Bread alone, Peter Owen editions) in 1973. Raised in a poor family, he fled at the age of 11 and became a street child from Tangier, where he lives in the slums of the city. At the age of 20, he decided to learn to read and write and become a teacher.
The book will be translated into french by Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1980, published in Arabic in 1982 and banned in Morocco from 1983 to 2000.
He died in 2003 at the military hospital in Rabat.