Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury (Arabic: إلياس خوري‎‎) (born 12 July 1948) is a Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic, and prominent public intellectual. He has published 10 novels, which have been translated into several foreign languages, including English, as well as several works of literary criticism. He has also written three plays. Between 1993 and 2009, he served as editor of Al-Mulhaq, the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Nahar.

Elias Khoury was born in 1948 into a Greek Orthodox middle-class family in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyye district of Beirut. This was the year that Palestinian refugees came to Lebanon and Jordan.

In 1967, as Lebanese intellectual life was becoming increasingly polarised, with the opposition taking on a radical Arab nationalist and pro-Palestinian hue, 19-year-old Khoury traveled to Jordan, where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and enlisted in Fatah, the largest resistance organization in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled in the wake of an attempted coup against King Hussein, in Black September.

He continued his studies in Paris and wrote a dissertation on the 1860 Lebanon conflict. After returning to Lebanon, Khoury became a researcher at the Palestine Liberation Organization's research center in Beirut. He took part in the Lebanese civil war that broke out in 1975, was seriously injured, and temporarily lost his eyesight.

In 1972, joined and became a member of the editorial board of the journal Mawaqif. Other members included Adonis, Hisham Sharabi, and somewhat later, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. Of this group, Khoury later remarked that it was important, but marginal to politics: "We were neither on the liberal right nor on the classical left. Intellectually speaking, we were very much linked to the Palestinian experience."

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