Amin Maalouf


Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born French author who has lived in France since 1976. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios as well as the 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He is a member of the Académie française.

Background

Maalouf was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in the Badaro cosmopolitan neighborhood, the second of four children. His parents had different cultural backgrounds. His mother, Odette Ghossein, is Lebanese of Turkish descent, from the Metn Village of Ain el Kabou, she was born in Egypt and lived there for many years before coming back to Lebanon. She currently lives in France. His father was from the Melkite Catholic community near the village of Baskinta in Ain el Qabou. Maalouf's mother was a staunch Maronite Catholic who insisted on sending him to Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour, a French Jesuit school. He studied sociology at the Francophone Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.

Career

Maalouf worked as the director of the Beirut-based daily newspaper An-Nahar until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when he moved to Paris, which became his permanent home.
Maalouf's first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 1983, examined the period on the basis of contemporaneous Arabic sources.
Besides novels, he has written four texts for musical compositions and several works of non-fiction, of which Crusades through Arab Eyes is probably the best known.
In 2011, he was elected to seat #29 of the Académie française, a chair previously held by Ernst Renan. He is trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf's uncle.

Awards

In 1993, Maalouf was awarded the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Rock of Tanios , set in 19th-century Lebanon. In 2010 he received the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award for Literature for his work, an intense mix of suggestive language, historic affairs in a Mediterranean mosaic of languages, cultures and religions and stories of tolerance and reconciliation.
He was elected a member of the Académie française on 23 June 2011 to fill seat 29, left vacant by the death of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Maalouf is the first person of Lebanese heritage to receive that honor. His book Un fauteuil sur la Seine'' briefly recounts the lives of those who preceded him in seat 29.
Maalouf has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Catholic University of Louvain, the American University of Beirut, the Rovira i Virgili University, the University of Évora, and the University of Ottawa.
In 2016, he won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for "Cultural Personality of the Year", the premier category with a prize of 1 million dirhams.
In 2020, he was awarded the National Order of Merit by the French government. He was given the honor by President Emmanuel Macron.

Honours and decorations

Works

Fiction

Maalouf's novels are marked by his experiences of civil war and migration. Their characters are itinerant voyagers between lands, languages, and religions and he prefers to write about "our past".
All Maalouf's librettos have been written for the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.