chouiten

A prize-winning novel from one of Algeria’s rising literary stars

In A Waltz, Lynda Chouiten depicts an irreverent and creative woman with an artistic temperament navigating the stiflingly conservative society in which she was raised. The narrative follows the path of Chahira, a seamstress from El Moudja--a fictional small coastal town in the Kabyle region of Algeria--to an international design competition in Vienna. Along the way, A Waltz expresses the strain of competing value systems, regional identities and expectations, and a cacophony of voices bearing down upon one woman while asking challenging questions about the nature of madness, confinement, and resistance to a patriarchal world.

Lynda Chouiten is an Algerian writer and academic and the winner of the 2019 Grand Prix Assia Djebar. Skyler Artes is the translator of Arabic as a Secret Song by Leïla Sebbar and I Die by This Country by Fawzia Zouari.