After attending a bilingual Arab-French primary school, he studied at the French high school in Tangier until the age of eighteen, then studied philosophy at Mohammed V University in Rabat, where he wrote his first poems—collected in Hommes sous linceul de silence (1971). He then taught philosophy in Morocco. But, in 1971, following the Arabisation of philosophy teaching, he had to leave for France, not being trained for pedagogy in Arabic. He settled in Paris to continue his psychology studies.

From 1972, he wrote numerous articles for the daily newspaper Le Monde. In 1975, he obtained a doctorate in social psychiatry. His writing would benefit from his experience as a psychotherapist (La Réclusion solitaire, 1976). In 1985, he published the novel The Sand Child, which made him famous. He won the Goncourt Prize in 1987 for The Sacred Night, a sequel to The Sand Child. In October 2013, he participated in a resounding colloquium at the Paris Senate on the Islam of the Enlightenment with Malek Chebel, Reza, Olivier Weber, Abdelkader Djemaï, Gilles Kepel, and Barmak Akram.

Tahar Ben Jelloun currently lives in Tangier with his wife and children (Merième, Ismane, Yanis, and Amine), for whom he has written several educational books (Racism Explained to My Daughter, 1998). Today, he is regularly requested for interventions in Moroccan, French, and European schools and universities.