Taos Amrouche was the first Algerian woman to publish a novel in French and the principal twentieth-century interpreter of Kabyle traditional song outside Algeria. She was born in 1913 in Tunis to a Kabyle Christian family from the village of Ighil Ali in Lesser Kabylia — the village had converted under the influence of the White Fathers in the 1880s, and the family migrated to Tunis in the 1900s under the cumulative pressures of religious-cultural marginalisation in their home region.
Her literary career produced four novels — Jacinthe noire (1947), Rue des tambourins (1960), L'Amant imaginaire (1975), and the posthumously published Solitude ma mère (1995) — drawing principally on her family's complicated position between Kabyle Berber, French colonial, and Tunisian-Mediterranean identifications. Her sustained autobiographical project across the four novels remains one of the principal francophone treatments of mid-twentieth-century Maghrebi life.
Her musical work is the more sustained legacy. Across more than three decades of concert and recorded performance, Taos collected and presented Kabyle traditional women's song — principally the corpus inherited from her mother Fadhma Aith Mansour Amrouche, herself a major collector and singer — to European and Mediterranean audiences. The five-album Chants berbères de Kabylie series, recorded between 1939 and 1975, is the principal commercial record of unaccompanied Kabyle women's song.
She died in Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire in southern France in 1976. Her brother Jean Amrouche (1906–1962) was a major francophone poet and an interlocutor of François Mauriac and Charles de Gaulle in the late colonial period. Her mother Fadhma's posthumous memoir Histoire de ma vie (1968) and her own posthumous Solitude ma mère together constitute one of the most extended Kabyle-women's autobiographical archives in any language.