Shantytown Kid
novel by Azouz Begag
Le Gone du Chaâba (transl. The Kid of the Chaaba), translated into English as Shantytown Kid by Naima Wolf, is an autobiographical novel by Azouz Begag about his life as a young Algerian boy growing up in a shantytown next to Lyon, France, called the Chaâba by its inhabitants.
Context
The story covers a period of approximately three years in the life of the protagonist and deals with issues developing from the clash between two cultures, that of France and that of North Africa, as well as the difficulties of finding a cultural identity between the two. The story focuses on the cultural differences between the Arab and French communities, as well as how the two groups react to each other. A version was filmed in 1998 by Christophe Ruggia, and received a César Award nomination for Best Debut.
Synopsis
The novel tells the story of Azouz, a young Algerian. He lives in Chaaba, a slum on the outskirts of Lyon, in a miserable hovel with neither water nor electricity, amongst other Arab families.
Azouz has two older siblings; a brother named Mustafa and a sister named Zohra. Even if they do well at school, they are required to work menial jobs at the shops in order to make a little money for their families. At school, Azouz sits at the front of class and always listens to what his teachers say. Despite arguing with his father Bouzid, he gets the second-best mark in the class after handing in an essay.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Shantytown Kid” as novel by Azouz Begag. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as novel by Azouz Begag. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q301192. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Shantytown Kid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.