Khoury, Elias (1948–) - PERSONAL HISTORY, INFLUENCES AND CONTRIBUTIONS, BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS, PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:, STORIES OF HUMILIATION AND INTERIOR DEFEAT
palestinian lebanese cultural beirut
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist whose work is known worldwide. For more than three decades, he has been active in cultural, political, and academic circles in Lebanon and the Arab world, defending the Palestinian cause, secular and democratic values, and the idea of a new Arab renaissance.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Born in Beirut on 12 July 1948, Khoury studied at the Good Shepherd School in Ashrafiyya. He then moved to the Lebanese University where he majored in history and graduated in 1970. He moved to Paris in 1971 and completed his DEA (master’s) in social history at the École Pratique des Hautes Études with a thesis on the 1860 civil war in Lebanon, which opposed Druze and Maronite Catholics in Mount Lebanon at a time of national and regional turmoil under a weakening Ottoman rule.
Beginning in 1972, Khoury has been involved in the Arab literary and cultural scene. He was an editorial board member of the “progressive” journal Mawaqif . In 1975 Khoury became an editor of Shu’un Filastiniyya (Palestinian affairs review) and an editorial director of al-Karmil (Palestinian literary review) in 1981. Between 1983 and 1990, he was editorial director of the cultural section of Lebanese daily al-Safir , and since 1992, he has been the editor of al-Mulhaq , the cultural supplement of the leading Lebanese daily An Nahar .
While pursuing his editorial career, Khoury also began a career in academia in the early 1980s, teaching literature and comparative literature at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the Lebanese American University. At the end of the 1990s, he began teaching at Columbia University and New York University, where he is a global distinguished professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.
He is married to playwright and...