ALGERIA - Oct. 22 - Woman Author Honoured With German Book Peace Price.

Writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar is honoured for her commitment towards Muslim women as she received the prestigious Peace Price of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association. (The award is traditionally presented on the sidelines of the Frankfurt Book Fair). The citation says: "Her work serves as a sign of hope for the democratic renewal of Algeria, for domestic peace in her home country and for understanding between the cultures. With a sense of commitment to the diverse roots of her culture, Assia Djebar has made an important contribution to a new self-confidence among women in the Arab world". (Assia Djebar - real name Fatima-Zohra Imalayene - was born at Cherchell on the coast in 1936, the daughter of a teacher of French, and was the first Algerian woman to be admitted to France's elite Ecole Normale Superieure. She began as a novelist in the 1950s. Les Impatients, 1958, tells of a young woman who feels imprisoned in her family. Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde, 1962, is about the politisation of Algerian women. In the 1970s she embarked on a study of a classical Arabic and experimented in film and theatre. In 1980 she returned to literature with a short-story collection Femmes D'Alger Dans Leur Appartement. She taught history for many years at the University of Algiers, and later taught French and cinema. Since 1997 she has been professor at the centre for French and Francophone countries at Louisiana State University. She said she quit Algeria in the 1980s because she felt a growing oppression of women which excluded them from the public eye, to the point where she found herself the only woman in the street or in the cafes. "I was taken for a tourist, which was unbearable". She said she was Muslim. She has not returned to Algeria since the civil war began in 1992 when the army intervened to prevent the FIS Islamic movement from coming to power, save for the death of her father).