Banipal (UK) Magazine of Modern Arab Literature - Contributors - Elias Khoury (1948

Elias Khoury was born in Beirut in 1948 and is prominent worldwide as a public intellectual. A polymath literary critic, journalist, novelist, playwright, academic and intellectual, after studying Sociology and History at the Lebanese University, Beirut, and the University of Paris, he became a journalist and literary critic. He worked as assistant editor and then managing editor of Shu’oun Filastinia (Palestinian Affairs).

Since 1975 he has published fourteen novels. He also served on the editorial board of the iconic literary magazines Mawaqif – with Adonis – and Al-Karmel with Mahmoud Darwish. Later he became editor of the cultural pages of As-Safir newspaper, and then editor of “Mulhaq”, An-Nahar’s weekly literary supplement.

Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Many of his novels have been published in translation into different languages. His works include four works of literary criticism, and three plays.

Front cover: The Gate of the Sun In 2000 he was awarded the Prize of Palestine for Gate of the Sun, and in 2006 its English translation by Humphrey Davies won the inaugural Banipal Arabic Literary Translation Prize. For details click here. The translation was also named Best Book of the Year by Le Monde Diplomatique, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and a Notable Book by The New York Times.

In December 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Owais Prize for fiction writing.

In January 2010 the translation by Humphrey Davies of his novel Yalo won the fifth year's award of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. For details click here.

In addition to his novels, Elias Khoury has published four books of literary criticism, three plays, two screenplays, and a collection of short stories.

He has had a distinguished academic career as a visiting professor at both Columbia and New York Universities and at the Lebanese American University, as Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies at the University of New York, also teaching at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut.

In Spring 2001, Banipal 12 featured excerpts from a long interview with him by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, the full interview published in Autumn of that year in Geschichten über Geschichten von Erinnerung im Romanwerk von Elias Khoury. (Reichert, 2001 Series: Literaturen im Kontext 8).

Click to read the excerpts in Banipal 12.

In the first year of Covid-19 pandemic, and following the 4 August 2020 massive explosion in Beirut’s port which made 300,000 left homeless, over 200 dead, and 7,000 injured, Banipal 69 (Autumn/Winter 2020) published Elias Khoury’s essay on that devastated city, The City of Strangers. Originally published in Arabic in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniya 124 (Autumn 2020) as part of that issue’s special section “Salute to Beirut”, it was published, in English translation by Humphrey Davies, in Banipal 69, in agreement with the author. Click to read The City of Strangers.

Twenty years after that interview with Elias Khoury, Banipal 67, (Spring 2021) assembled a major feature, entitled Elias Khoury, The Novelist, with translations from works, reviews and specially commissioned articles on his work and his place in Arabic and world literature from Maia Tabet, Maher Jarrar, Abdo Wazen, Saif al-Rahbi, Aida Fahmawi Watad, Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Raef Zreik, Fakhri Saleh, and Paula Haydar.

Maher Jarrar's opening paragraph to his essay entitled Language and Textual Strategies: A Reading of Elias Khoury’s Novels seems even more relevant today, 15 September 2024 – the day Elias Khoury left this earth, than it was in 2020:

At times when the pain of the Arab people has become unbearable, Elias Khoury has proven himself a critical thinker with command of diverse forms of expression, whose voice emanates from a mind committed to liberation struggles and who incorporates these struggles into his everyday work. In this sense, he exemplifies the three characteristics that Edward Said called for in an intellectual: daring to speak truth to power, bearing witness to oppression and suffering, and being a voice of dissent in the country in which he or she is based during clashes with ruling powers and institutions.

The essay ends, with an equally thoughtful estimation of Elias Khoury's boundless empathy and courage:

Wars have no victors, his work seems to say; we are all losers in war. We are all killed in them and are all strangers; to be alienated is what it means to be human. And at the heart of the existential questions raised by Khoury’s texts is Palestine, beset by bloodshed, political debauchery and betrayal. In them, Palestine becomes the central question, an issue that can fuse together all peoples and all strangers in their search for meaning, freedom and human dignity.