Saphia Azzeddine was born on 12 December 1979 in Agadir, Morocco. A French-Moroccan novelist, screenwriter and director, she has published nine novels since 2008, translated into German, Spanish, Italian and Swedish.
Agadir, Ferney-Voltaire
The daughter of a father from Figuig, in eastern Morocco, and a French-Moroccan mother, she spent her early childhood in Agadir. Her parents were tailors. At the age of nine, she moved with her family to Ferney-Voltaire, in the Ain department, a few kilometres from Geneva.
After a literary baccalauréat, she earned a degree in sociology, took a gap year in Houston, in the United States, and then worked as an assistant to a diamond dealer in Geneva.
Journalism
In the early 2000s, she became a writer for a Geneva magazine. She wrote interviews and profiles before devoting herself to fiction.
Confidences à Allah
On 4 January 2008, Léo Scheer published her first novel, Confidences à Allah, the monologue of a young shepherdess who addresses God. The book received the prix Nice-Baie-des-Anges the same year. Adapted for the stage by Gérard Gelas at the 2008 Avignon Off festival, with Alice Belaïdi alone on stage, the production earned the actress the Molière award for best newcomer in 2010. The text also became a graphic novel published by Futuropolis in 2015.
From Léo Scheer to Fayard
Mon père est femme de ménage (2009), La Mecque-Phuket (2010) and Héros anonymes (2011) followed at Léo Scheer, then Combien veux-tu m'épouser ? at Grasset in 2013, a satire of the ultra-rich.
In 2015, Bilqiss, published by Stock, told the story of the trial of a widow who gave the call to prayer in place of a drunken muezzin. The novel received the first prix des Lecteurs de L'Hebdo in Switzerland and the Burgundy literary prize for secondary-school and apprentice readers. Sa mère (2017) and Mon père en doute encore (2020), an account devoted to her father, came next. In February 2026, Fayard published Mémoire sous scellés, a novel about the looting of Iraq's heritage.
Film
Encouraged by the producer Nathalie Rheims, she adapted and directed Mon père est femme de ménage herself, with François Cluzet. The opening film of the Alpe d'Huez festival in January 2011, it won the Europe 1 audience award there and drew about 300,000 viewers in cinemas. The same year, she acted in Olivier Baroux's L'Italien. In 2018, she co-directed the comedy Demi-sœurs with François-Régis Jeanne. In 2022, an American adaptation of Bilqiss, directed by Oualid Mouaness, was announced.
A free voice
A regular guest on television and radio, she refuses labels. She says she is closer to a feminism “of the purse” than to a feminism of principle, and rejects the role of spokesperson that people sometimes try to assign to her.