Biography of Ali Zamir

On a kwasa-kwasa sinking between Anjouan and Mayotte, a seventeen-year-old girl feels the waves carry her away, and in the time of a breath, recounts her life in a single sentence of three hundred and eighteen pages. It is not death that frightens her most, but the silence that will follow. This opening scene – both desperate and possessing a beauty that cuts like a knife in the water – introduces Anguille sous roche, Ali Zamir’s first novel, published in 2016, which revealed to the Francophone public a writer from the Indian Ocean.

In brief

Key dates

A reader by candlelight

Ali Zamir was born on 7 January 1987 in Mutsamudu, the capital of Anjouan Island, in the Comoros archipelago. His father, a teacher who later became an educational advisor, and his mother, a housewife, separated when he was young. It is his father who accompanies him in his school journey, while his mother watches over daily life. Very early on, Ali Zamir develops a devouring passion for reading, a passion that plays with ordinary but very real obstacles: on the island, power cuts are frequent, and he reads by the light of a candle. “Since elementary school, I read, even without electricity,” he will confess years later. Through the resources of the Alliance française, he discovers Victor Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables), Balzac, Flaubert, Sagan, and then, much later, Kafka, Camus, and Le Clézio.

In 2005, he wins a scholarship and flies to Cairo, where he undertakes a master’s degree in modern letters at Cairo University, which he will complete in 2010. The city he takes for a new home turns into a writing laboratory. He frequents writers like Michel Butor or Erik Orsenna, and it is from the end of 2009 that he launches himself into writing his first novel: Anguille sous roche. He finishes it in 2010.

But before the novel, it is short stories that constitute his first field of experimentation. His initial texts revolve around AIDS ("Roger et Rosine", “Karim l’invincible”, “Une fille pas comme les autres”), and in 2008, his short story Mangeuse de rat ! wins the Grand Prix of the Department of French Language and Literature of the Faculty of Letters in Cairo. This is a first that announces a bold style, capable of tackling taboos with irony and poetry.

A literary phenomenon

For years, Ali Zamir navigates between writing and civil engagement. Upon returning to the Comoros in 2011, he holds various public functions: French teacher, municipal advisor, mission officer at the ministry, and then, in 2014, Director of Culture and Associative Affairs for Anjouan Island. Simultaneously, he is General Secretary of the Comoros Heritage Collective from 2014 to 2016. It is at the heart of these responsibilities that he signs his first publishing contract.

In 2016, Anguille sous roche is published by Le Tripode editions, following which the author becomes a sensation of the literary season. The novel features Anguille, a seventeen-year-old teenager who, abandoned by her lover Vorace, boards a kwasa-kwasa — these clandestine boats that cross the Indian Ocean to reach Mayotte Island, France’s 101st department. The vessel sinks. The young woman, as she is sinking, recalls her life. The novel fits into a single sentence of 318 pages, a formal feat that Zamir defends as an act of freedom: “In literature, there are no borders,” he says in an interview with franceinfo. The book meets both popular and critical success, surpassing 10,000 copies sold and being compared to Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan.

Anguille sous roche wins the Prix Senghor and Special Mention of the Wepler Prize in 2016, the Mandela Literature Prize and the Prix des Rencontres à Lire de Dax in 2017. It is translated into English (A Girl Called Eel, Jacaranda Books, 2019), German, and Dutch, and is the subject of several theatrical adaptations. Emmanuel Macron praises it “under the dome of the Académie française” in March 2018, qualifying the work as a “stunning narrative.” Télérama includes it in its list of best books of 2016, while Fnac makes it one of the sixteen novels that defined the year.

The writer affirms: “I write not only to communicate but especially to liberate myself by giving a voice to those who do not have it. Writing is my only reason for being.”

Between revelation and constancy

My Spark, published in 2017, was born from a five-month writing residency offered by Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole at the archaeological museum of Lattara, in Lattes, near Montpellier: Ali Zamir was its first invited resident author. The novel, written in three months, reads like a tale à la One Thousand and One Nights, where voices overlap and stories nest within one another. The heroine, Étincelle, travels by plane from Grande Comore to Anjouan, caught in turbulence, and recounts the love stories her mother’s memories whispered to her. The characters bear names that are already theses: Pain, Sweetness, Efferalgan, Dafalgan, Vitamin, Calcium. Alain Mabanckou sees in it « one of the most extraordinary love stories ». The novel was a finalist for the Prix Méditerranée des lycéens 2018 and selected for the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde.

With Deranged As I Am (2019), Ali Zamir changes register while retaining his stylistic DNA. The novel recounts the tragicomic misadventures of an unlucky docker on the port of Mutsamudu, a man with a makeshift cart who carries luggage to make a living. His life turns upside down when he crosses paths with « a dazzling woman ». The tone oscillates between farce and drama, and the press praises « irresistible verbal invention » (L’Humanité) or, for Le Monde, this « enterprise that has occupied him since his beginnings: twisting, breaking, subverting the rules of the French language from its despised fringes ». The Roman France Télévisions prize crowned the work in 2019, while the novel was in contention for the Grand prix RTL-Lire and the Grand prix du Roman Métis. The author, a guest on La Grande Librairie on France 5, explained that he wanted to « take fragile figures » to be « the spokesperson for those who have no voice ». The novel was translated into English (Deranged As I Am, Fum d’Estampa Press, 2022).

Jouissance, published in May 2022, operates an even more radical formal rupture: the narrator is no longer human, but a book itself—a novel that tells its unhappy life as a literary object, thrown from trash can to trash can, reread with different hands, soaring over secrets, encounters in the library, scams, reflections of The New Detective. Le Matricule des anges describes it as « lyrical and trivial, allegorical and burlesque ». La Radio Télévision Suisse designates it as « one of the most astonishing reads of this spring ».

Ali Zamir lives in Montpellier, in the department of Hérault, where he works at the Written and Graphic Heritage service of the Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole Mediatheque network. He describes himself as a « universal » writer: « I am an African writer, but perhaps above all I am a universal writer: my writing dares to cross borders. » He aspires one day to open libraries and mediatheques on the island of Anjouan.

Major Works

Legacy and influence

Ali Zamir establishes himself as one of the most singular voices in contemporary Francophone literature. His writing, which blurs the boundaries between novel, tale, and prose poetry, has captivated readers far from traditional circuits of « African literature » — a label the author nonetheless rejects. His language, where rare words meet familiar register, where syntax itself seems to undulate like the sea, has inspired university research, including a 2024 thesis at Sorbonne Université dedicated to the polyphony of his four novels. The English, German, and Dutch translations of his work testify to a dissemination that goes beyond the circle of intellectuals.

Above all, Ali Zamir has opened a breach: a Comorian writer who speaks of his archipelago without confining himself to exoticism, who questions literary conventions without rejecting them, and who, coming from an island with capricious electricity, has made the French language an instrument of freedom. As Valérie Marin la Meslée summarizes in Le Point: « Literature is a chance to access the impossible. »

Sources and references

1. « Ali Zamir », Wikipédia en français, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Zamir, accessed October 18, 2026.
2. « Ali Zamir», Wikipedia (English), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Zamir, accessed October 18, 2026.
3. « Ali Zamir », Île en île, https://ile-en-ile.org/zamir/, accessed October 18, 2026.
4. « Ali Zamir: “Literature does not need passports” », RFI, https://www.rfi.fr/fr/hebdo/20171006-ali-zamir-litterature-comores-francophonie-francais-conte-mabanckou, accessed October 18, 2026.
5. « “Eel Under the Rock” by Ali Zamir: “In literature, there are no borders” », franceinfo, https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/livres/roman/quot-anguille-sous-rochequot-d-039-ali-zamir-quot-en-litterature-il-ny-a-pas-de-frontieresquot_3340917.html, accessed October 18, 2026.

6. « ZAMIR ALI », Occitanie Livre & Lecture, https://www.occitanielivre.fr/annuaire/zamir-ali, consulted on 18 October 2026.
7. « A mépriser le « verbe » Ali Zamir brûle le monde », Muzdalifa House, https://muzdalifahouse.com/2023/02/27/ali-zamir-a-mepriser-le-verbe-brule-le-monde/, consulted on 18 October 2026.
8. « Jouissance », Institut du Monde Arabe, https://librairie.imarabe.org/9782370553249-jouissance, consulted on 18 October 2026.
9. « Ali Zamir, « Jouissance » (Le Tripode) : Vivre livre », Livres Hebdo, https://www.remue.net/jouissance, consulted on 18 October 2026.
10. « A Girl Called Eel », Jacaranda Books, https://shop.btpubservices.com/title/9781909762817, consulted on 18 October 2026.
11. « Ali Zamir », Fum d’Estampa Press, https://www.fumdestampa.com/writers/alizamir, consulted on 18 October 2026.
12. Nadjloudine, Abdel Fatah, La polyphonie dans “Anguille sous roche”, “Mon étincelle”, “Dérangé que je suis” et “Jouissance” d’Ali Zamir : approche énonciative et sémiostylistique, thesis, Sorbonne Université, 2024, http://theses.fr/2024SORUL068/document.

• Ali Zamir — Anguille sous roche (2016)
• Ali Zamir — Dérangé que je suis (2019)
• Ali Zamir — Jouissance (2022)
• Ali Zamir — Mon Étincelle (2017)