Mahi Binebine

Biography

In 2024 Mahi Binebine gave the museum on the island of Gorée, from which slaves were once shipped, a huge painting, “In the Same Boat”. A year later he said he could have called it “In the Same Galley”.

Painting and novels have run side by side in his work since the 1980s.

He was born in 1959 in Marrakesh, the youngest of five children. From childhood he remembers the “storytellers’ circle” where he would stop on the way to school. In 1980 he left for Paris to study mathematics and taught it for eight years, then gave it up for writing and painting. In 1994–1999 he lived in New York; his paintings entered the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2002 he returned to Marrakesh for good and has since divided his time between Morocco, France and the United States.

His first novel, “The Slave’s Sleep” (1992), won the Prix Méditerranée. Then came “The Funeral of Milk” (1994), “The Poet’s Shadow” (1996), “Cannibals” (1999), whose English translation was shortlisted in 2004 for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, “Pollens” (2001, Prix de l’amitié franco-arabe), “Burnt Umber” (2004), “The Griot of Marrakesh” (2005), “The Lord Will Repay You” (2013). In “The Funeral of Milk” and other books his family appears: his mother Mamya, his grandmother, his brother Aziz. Aziz, a young officer, took part in the failed coup of 1971 against King Hassan II and spent eighteen years in the desert prison of Tazmamart; of the fifty-six prisoners, half survived. Tahar Ben Jelloun made the story the basis of his novel “This Blinding Absence of Light”, and Binebine himself turned his brother into “the Absent One”, the officer Abel, in “The King’s Fool” (2017) and returned to him in “My Ghost Brother” (2022).

“The Stars of Sidi Moumen” (2010) tells of teenagers from the Sidi Moumen slums of Casablanca and of how they come to terror; the book grew out of the bombings of 16 May 2003, won the Prix du roman arabe and the first La Mamounia prize, and Nabil Ayouch made it into the film “Horses of God” (2012), Morocco’s submission for the Oscars. The English translation was shortlisted in 2014 for the Best Translated Book Award. After the same attacks Binebine and Ayouch set up the Ali Zaoua cultural foundation, to bring teenagers from poor districts back to life through art: the first centre, “Les Étoiles”, opened in Sidi Moumen in 2014, and by 2025 there were eight such centres in Morocco. In 2011 in Rabat he was presented with the Public Diplomacy Trophy for his contribution to Morocco’s standing abroad. “Rue du Pardon” (2019) brought him a second Prix Méditerranée, in 2020, and made the Renaudot selection; “The Night Will Carry Us Away” (2025) won the Prix Paul Bourdarie of the Académie des sciences d’outre-mer.

He exhibited in 2014 at the Musée de la Palmeraie in Marrakesh, and in 2020–2021 at the Comptoir des Mines gallery in Marrakesh he showed “Oblique Horizons”, an invitation to think about the world after Covid, about living together and solidarity. In 2022 he was one of the founders of the Marrakesh African Book Festival. In 2024 he was appointed curator of the first Moroccan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, then replaced. The painting for Gorée was given the same year.