Born in Tokyo (Japan), Toni Maraini spent two years (1943–1945) as a small child in a Japanese concentration camp after the family was arrested for being anti-Fascist. She grew up in Sicily after the war, and went to high school in Florence. She studied art history and anthropology at London University, at Smith College (USA) and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. From 1964 to 1986 she lived in Morocco, where she taught at Rabat University. In Morocco she did pioneer field research in art and culture. There, she published several books (essays, art history) and three collections of poems (Message d'une Migration, 1976, Le Récit de l'Occultation, 1984, Phantasmata Diwan, 1990). She works now in Italy as a freelance author (criticism, poetry, novels, essays) and continues to write on North African culture and to translate North African writers and poets.