Algerian French-language novelist Assia Djebar has died in a Paris hospital at the age of 78. French President François Hollande hailed her as a “woman of conviction” and a “great intellectual”, reports RFI.
Djebar was a “great Algerian intellectual, a writer, historian, film-maker and French-language university professor”, a statement by the Elysée presidential palace said on Saturday.
Her work was “committed to opposing regression and, often, misoginy”, it added.
Born Fatma-Zohra Imalayène, her pseudonym meant Consolation (Assia) Intransigence (Djebar).
She is to be buried according to her wishes in her birthplace, Cherchell, a coastal town inhabited by members of the non-Arab Berber people on Algeria coast.
Elected in 2005 to the Académie Francaise, France's top literary institution, she was seen as a contender for the Nobel prize for literature in her later years.
Djebar wrote more than 15 novels in French as well as poetry and short stories, receiving widespread acclaim for her treatment of Muslim women and their struggle for emancipation.