Amin Maalouf (French:[maluf];Arabic:أمين رشدي بطرس طنّوص معلوفArabic pronunciation:[maʕˈluːf]; born 1949) is aLebanese-born French[1] author who has lived in France since 1976.[2] Although his native language isArabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages.
Maalouf was born inBeirut, Lebanon, and grew up in theBadaro cosmopolitan neighbourhood,[6] the second of four children. His mother, of Turkish ancestry, was from Egypt, and his father was aMelkite Catholic[7] from the village of Machrah.[8] He studied sociology and economics at theSaint Joseph University of Beirut.
Maalouf worked as the director ofAn-Nahar, a Beirut-based daily newspaper, until the start of theLebanese civil war in 1975, when he moved to Paris, where he first became a journalist for an economic newspaper. 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 bookUn fauteuil sur la Seine briefly recounts the lives of those who preceded him inseat #29 as a member of theAcadémie française.[10][4]
In 1993, Maalouf was awarded thePrix Goncourt for his novelThe Rock of Tanios (French:Le rocher de Tanios), set in 19th-century Lebanon.[11][12][13] In 2004, the original, French edition of hisOrigins: A Memoir (Origines, 2004) won thePrix Méditerranée.[14]
In 2010, he received the SpanishPrince 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 theAcadémie française on 23 June 2011 to fill seat29, left vacant by the death of anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss.[4][15] Maalouf is the first person of Lebanese heritage to receive that honour.[3]
In 2016, he won theSheikh Zayed Book Award for "Cultural Personality of the Year", the premier category with a prize of 1 milliondirhams (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...
