Literary
Morocco

Paul Bowles

Tangier

Lived in Tangier 1947–1999. Died there. Buried in New York.

The gravitational center of literary Tangier. Arrived on Gertrude Stein's advice in 1931. Settled permanently in 1947 at the Immeuble Itesa. Composer turned novelist. Translated Moroccan oral storytellers (Choukri, Mrabet, Layachi) into English. Recorded 60 hours of Moroccan folk music for the Library of Congress. His apartment became a pilgrimage site. Every major writer of the mid-century passed through his door.

William S. Burroughs

Tangier

Lived in Tangier 1953–1958. Wrote Naked Lunch there.

Arrived in 1953 after reading Bowles's fiction. Rented a room at the Hotel Muniria above a brothel. Drugs were cheap, sex was available, and nobody cared. Typed pages covered his floor with dirty footprints on them. Kerouac and Ginsberg arrived in 1957 to help assemble the manuscript. Burroughs reinvented Tangier's International Zone as "Interzone" — a liminal nowhere-space that became one of the most influential concepts in postwar literature.

Mohamed Choukri

Tangier / Rif

Born in the Rif. Migrated to Tangier. Learned to read at 21.

Born in poverty in the Rif during famine. His father killed his brother. Migrated to Tangier as a child. Illiterate until 21, when he enrolled in primary school. Became a schoolteacher, then a writer. For Bread Alone — dictated to Bowles in Spanish, translated into English — was banned in Morocco and across the Arab world for its unflinching depiction of poverty, sex, and survival. French edition translated by Tahar Ben Jelloun became a bestseller in France.

Mohammed Mrabet

Tangier

Born and lived in Tangier. Oral storyteller.

Illiterate fisherman, hustler, and golf caddie who became one of Morocco's most translated authors without ever writing a word. He told his stories in Darija to Paul Bowles, who translated and edited them into English. His tales capture Tangier street life with dark humor and supernatural elements — jinn, sorcery, desire, betrayal. His work represents some of the only Moroccan literature composed in Darija rather than fusha or French.

Elias Canetti

Marrakech

Visited Marrakech in 1954. Wrote The Voices of Marrakesh.

Nobel Prize winner (1981). Spent only a few weeks in Marrakech in 1954 but produced one of the sharpest books on Morocco. Fourteen short episodes — the souks, the Djemaa el-Fna, the mellah, the blind beggars, the storytellers. Written in German, published 13 years after the visit. A masterclass in the essay form. No orientalist gaze — Canetti writes with humility about what he cannot understand.

Brion Gysin

Tangier

Lived in Tangier intermittently 1950s–1970s. Opened 1001 Nights restaurant.

Painter, writer, inventor of the cut-up technique (which Burroughs made famous). Met Bowles in 1938. Opened the 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier, where he introduced the Master Musicians of Joujouka to the Western world. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones recorded them there. Gysin was the connector — between Moroccan Sufi music, Beat literature, and the counterculture.

Jean Genet

Tangier / Larache

Lived intermittently in Tangier and Larache. Buried in Larache.

Orphan, thief, prostitute, convict, playwright, political radical. Genet was drawn to Tangier's underworld and to Morocco's young men. He spent years between Tangier and Larache, where he is buried — one of only a handful of major French writers interred on African soil. Choukri wrote a sympathetic portrait of him. His presence in Morocco was more about living than writing — he found a freedom there that France denied him.

Edith Wharton

Fes / Marrakech / Rabat

Traveled through Morocco in 1917. One of the first Western women to do so.

Traveled through Morocco in 1917 at the invitation of French Resident-General Lyautey, during a period when the country was largely closed to foreign visitors. Her travelogue describes Fes, Marrakech, Rabat, and Salé with the sharp eye she brought to New York society. Criticized for colonial perspective, but the book remains one of the earliest detailed Western accounts of Moroccan architecture, gardens, and domestic life.

Isabelle Eberhardt

Across North Africa

Lived in North Africa from 1897. Traveled extensively in Morocco.

Converted to Islam, dressed as a man, rode horses through the Sahara, drank and smoked kif, survived an assassination attempt, and drowned in a flash flood at 27. Swiss-born, Russian-speaking, French-writing, Arabic-fluent. She became Si Mahmoud Essaadi. Her journals and stories were published posthumously — fragmentary, fierce, and unlike anything else in colonial-era literature. Bowles translated some of her work.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Fes / Rabat / Paris

Born in Fes. Morocco is central to all his work.

Prix Goncourt winner (1987) — the first Moroccan to win France's highest literary prize. Born in Fes, educated in Rabat, lives in Paris. Writes in French about Moroccan realities: gender, immigration, political prisoners, the gap between tradition and modernity. Translated Choukri's For Bread Alone into French. His work bridges Moroccan experience and the French literary establishment.

Henri Matisse

Tangier

Painted in Tangier 1912–1913. Two extended stays.

Not a writer but essential to Morocco's creative mythology. Stayed at the Hotel Villa de France in Tangier. The light changed his palette permanently. His Moroccan paintings are among his most important — luminous, flat, saturated with color. "Morocco helped me make the necessary transition," he said. Room 35 at the Villa de France is now the Matisse Room.

Ibn Battuta

Tangier / the known world

Born in Tangier. The greatest traveler of the medieval world.

Left Tangier in 1325 at age 21 for the hajj to Mecca. Didn't return for 24 years. Traveled 120,000 km across the Islamic world — three times the distance Marco Polo covered. From Mali to China, from the Volga to the Maldives. His Rihla (journey) was dictated to a court scholar in Fes. The original literary Moroccan. Every journey since is a footnote to his.