Google has celebrated the famous Algerian writer, Assia Djebar, on what would have been her 81st birthday.

Known as one of North Africa’s most influential writers, Djebar was a celebrated author, filmmaker and firm proponent of women’s rights.

Throughout her life, Djebar wrote more than 15 books, including novels, plays and poem. Among them were the novels “So Vast the Prison,” about the subordination of women in Arab society, and “Algerian White,” about Algeria’s ongoing struggle between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society, as well as the short-story collection “The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry.”

She published her first book, "La Soif" (translates literally to "The Thirst", but called "The Mischief" in its English version), at the age of 21, which earned wide recognition.

A review in The New York Times called “The Mischief” “a strange, light, quite entertaining novella,” adding that it is “nicely plotted and skillfully executed in an elliptical, veiled prose.”

As the first Algerian and first Muslim woman to be accepted to one of France’s most elite schools in 1955, she left Algeria, only to return after the country won independence in 1962.
She lived between Algeria, the US and Paris for much of her life.

Upon Djebar’s death in 2015, at the age of 78, then-French President Francois Hollande said she was a "woman of conviction, whose multiple and fertile identities fed her work, between Algeria and France, between Berber, Arab and French."

She is celebrated by Google on what would be her 81st birthday in a Google Doodle in the Middle East and North Africa.