Dalila Kerchouche

Biography

Dalila Kerchouche (دليلة كرشوش), born in 1973 in Bias, is a French journalist and writer. She was born in 1973 in a harki camp in southwest France, located in the Lot-et-Garonne department. A former journalist at L'Express and Le Figaro Madame, Dalila Kerchouche received the Association of Women Journalists Award at the age of 21 for her first article published in L'Express, entitled "A Veil on Olympism." She is best known for her autobiographical account, My Father, This Harki (Seuil, 2003), which sold 40,000 copies and received widespread press coverage. This work is the basis of the screenplay for the television film Harkis, by Alain Tasma, co-written with the screenwriter and director Arnaud Malherbe, broadcast in prime-time on France 2 in October 2006, attracting more than 6.3 million viewers. This film received the Europa Prize for best fiction screenplay, awarded in Berlin in 2007. She is also the author of the documentary Amères Patries, broadcast on France 5, and the novel Leïla, Avoir 17 ans Dans Un Camp De Harkis (Seuil, 2007). She denounces the institutional discrimination suffered by former auxiliaries of the French army, France's ingratitude towards them as well as state lies, and contributes to rehabilitating the history of the harkis in the collective memory. Her novel, Leïla, received the Solidarity Prize at the Paris Book Fair in 2008. On September 21, 2016, she published Espionnes (Spies), published by Flammarion, a unique insight into the French secret services, revealing the true face of women involved in national security. For the first time, some fifty of them—investigators at the DRNED (National Directorate of National Intelligence and Security), case officers at the DGSE (General Directorate of Security and Intelligence), agents of the DGSI and the new RG (General Directorate of Internal Security), military counter-spies, and super-customs officers—agreed to confide in a journalist. They recounted what they never confide to their colleagues or their husbands: their high-tension double lives, the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo terrorists and the November 13 attacks, the weight of secrecy within couples, the machismo of spies, and their struggle to assert themselves in this shadowy world of power. Without hiding any of the flaws or successes of the secret services in the fight against terrorism.