Amin Maalouf
| Amin Maalouf | |
|---|---|
Amin Maalouf by Claude Truong-Ngoc, 2013.
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| Born |
25 February 1949 Beirut, Lebanon |
| Occupation | Writer, scholar and novelist |
| Language | French |
| Notable works | Leo the African, Rock of Tanios, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, and Samarkand |
Amin Maalouf (Arabic: أمين معلوف; born 25 February 1949) 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 is a literary giant."
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 was born in Egypt, where her father, a Maronite Christian married to a woman born in Turkey, had gone for work. His Lebanese father was from the Melkite Greek Catholic community. Maalouf's mother was a staunch 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.
He 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 1993, Maalouf was awarded the Prix Goncourt for his novel Le rocher de Tanios, set in 19th-century Lebanon. In 2010 he received the 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.
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