Mohamed Chukri was born in 1935 in Beni Chiker, a Moroccan town in the Rif. Raised in a poor family, his father's violence forced him to flee and, at just eleven years old, to live on the streets of Tangier surrounded by misery, violence, prostitution and drugs. At the age of twenty, still illiterate, he went to Larache to study. During this stage of training he came into contact with literature. In the 1960s, Chukri returned to Tangier, where he continued to frequent bars and brothels, and where he began to write down his personal experiences. His first story, Violence on the Beach, appeared in Al-Adab magazine in 1966. His literary concerns led him to rub shoulders with established writers such as Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams, encounters that were recorded in his memoirs (Paul Bowles, the inmate of Tangier and Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams in Tangier). In addition to his literary production, he also translated poems by Machado, Aleixandre and Lorca into Arabic, among others. Chukri knew international success thanks to his autobiographical novel El pan a secas (1973); Censored for scandalous in the Arab countries, it was not published definitively in Morocco until 2000. Time of errors (1992) and Faces, loves, curses (1996), are the other two novels that make up the trilogy of his life. Mohamed Chukri died in Rabat in 2003.