File Photo: Picture taken on June 22, 2006 shows Algerian writer Assia Djebar. (Agence France-Presse)
Novelist Assia Djebar, an ardent defender of women's rights in her native Algeria, has died aged 78, state radio said today.
The French-language author and filmmaker, who was seen as a contender for the 2011 Nobel literature prize, died yesterday in a hospital in Paris and will be buried in her village of Cherchell, west of Algiers, it said.