Elias Khoury

ELIAS KHOURY
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
Elias Khoury born in Beirut on 12july,1948. He studied at the Good Shepherd School in Ashrafiya. He then moved to the Lebanese University where he majored in history and graduated in 1970. Then he moved to Paris in 1971 and completed his ‘DEA’(master’s) in social history with a thesis on the 1860 civil war in Lebanon, which opposed Druze and Maronite Catholics in Mount Lebanon at a time of national a 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’an filastiniyya” (Palestinian affair reviews) 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 1980’s, teaching literature and comparative literature at the Lebanese University , the American University of Beirut, and the Lebanese American University. At the end of 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 artist Najla Jraysati, and is the father of Abla and Talal.
INFLUENCES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Khoury published his first novel ‘An ‘illaqat al-da’irah’ in 1975. Two years later ‘al jabal al- saghir’ (The little...