Nadia Tueni

Nadia Tueni
Born	Nadia Hamadeh 1935 Beirut
Died	1983 (age 47-48) Beit Meri
Occupation	Poet, writer
Nationality	Lebanese
Spouse	Ghassan Tueni (1954-1983; her death); 3 children

Nadia Mohammad Hamadeh Tueni (1935–1983) was a Lebanese Francophone poet, who authored of numerous volumes of poetry.

Nadia Mohammad Ali Hamadeh was born in Beirut in 1935, to a Lebanese Druze father, Mohammed Ali Hamadeh, who was a diplomat and writer, and a French Algerian mother. She grew up bilingual. Her brother, Marwan Hamadeh, is a politician, and another brother, Ali Hamadeh, is a journalist at An Nahar and Future TV.

Nadia Tueni was educated in French schools in Lebanon and Greece. She attended Ecole des Soeurs de Besançon, then La Mission Laïque Française. She received her secondary education at the Lycée Français in Athens where her father was ambassador of Lebanon. She received her law degree at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. However, there is another report stating that she attended the Université Saint-Joseph, but could not complete her study there due to her marriage in 1954.

Tueni published her first book of poems, Les Textes Blonds, in 1963. She worked as the literary editor of the Lebanese French-language newspaper, The Day, in 1967 and contributed to various Arabic and French publications.

She married Ghassan Tueni, the publisher of An Nahar and doyen of the Lebanese press, in 1954. They had three children, all of whom would predecease their father, who long outlived her. Her son, Gebran Tueni, a journalist and politician, was assassinated in 2005. Another son, Makram, was 21 when he died in a car accident in Paris in 1987. A daughter, Nayla, who was born in 1955 died of cancer at age 7.

She describes her country, Lebanon, in Poems of Love and War (2006:xxxv) as follows: "I belong to a country that commits suicide every day while it is being assassinated. As a matter of fact, I belong to a country that died several times. Why should I not die too of the gnawing, ugly, slow, and vicious death, of this Lebanese death?"

Nadia Tueni died in Beit Meri near Beirut in 1983 after an 18-year battle with cancer. She was 47.

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