Amin Maalouf (French:[maluf]; Arabic: أمين معلوفArabic pronunciation:[maʕˈluːf]; born 25 February 1949) is a Lebanese-born French[1] author who has lived in France since 1976.[2] Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages.
Baskinta, next to the village of Machrah where Maalouf's father came from.
Maalouf was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in the Badaro cosmopolitan neighbourhood,[6] the second of four children. His parents had different cultural backgrounds. His father was a Greek of the Melkite Catholic community[7] of the village of Machrah,[8] near Baskinta in Ain el Qabou. His mother, Odette Ghossein, is Lebanese from the Metn Village of Ain el Kabou, and of Turkish descent. She was born in Egypt and lived there for many years before coming back to Lebanon; she lived in France until her passing in 2021 at the age of 100 years.
Maalouf worked as the director of An-Nahar, a Beirut-based daily newspaper, 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), examines the period based on contemporaneous Arabic sources.[3]
Along with his nonfiction work, he has written four texts for musical compositions and numerous novels.
His book Un fauteuil sur la Seine briefly recounts the lives of those who preceded him in seat #29 as a member of the Académie française.[10][4]
In 1993, Maalouf was awarded the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Rock of Tanios (French: Le rocher de Tanios), set in 19th-century Lebanon.[11][12][13] In 2004, the original, French edition of his Origins: A Memoir (Origines, 2004) won the Prix Méditerranée.[14]
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.[4][15] Maalouf is the first person of Lebanese heritage to receive that honour.[3]
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 (approx. US$272,000).[16] In the same year, the University of Venice Ca' Foscari awarded him the Bauer-Incroci di civiltà prize for fostering cultural dialogue between civilizations.[17]
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".
^Esposito, Claudia (2013), "Of Chronological Others and Alternative Histories: Amin Maalouf and Fawzi Mellah", The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb, Lexington Books, p. 36, ISBN978-0739168226, born into a culturally composite family - his mother was Egyptian of Turkish origin, his father a Greek Catholic in 1949 in Lebanon...