Abdelwahab Meddeb

Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian Arabic: عبد الوهاب المدب‎; 1946 – 5 November 2014) was an award-winning French-language poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, cultural critic, political commentator, radio producer, public intellectual and professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.

Meddeb was born in Tunis, French Tunisia, in 1946, into a learned and patrician milieu. His family’s origins stretch from Tripoli and Yemen on his mother’s side, to Spain and Morocco on his father’s side. Raised in a traditionally observant North African Muslim family, Meddeb began learning the Qur'an at the age of four from his father, Sheik Mustapha Meddeb, a scholar of Islamic law at the Zitouna, the great mosque and university of Tunis. At the age of six he began his bilingual education at the Franco-Arabic school that was part of the famous Collège Sadiki. Thus began an intellectual trajectory nourished, in adolescence, by the classics of both Arabic and French and European literatures.

In 1967, Meddeb moved to Paris to continue his university studies at the Sorbonne in art history. He has lived there ever since, traveling the world as a poet, writer, translator, cultural critic, invited lecturer, scholar-in-residence and visiting professor.

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