Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf (b. 1949, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-French novelist and essayist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1976. He was a journalist and editor at the Beirut newspaper An-Nahar and at the Paris-based magazine Jeune Afrique before turning to literary writing. He was elected to the Académie française in 2011 and serves as its permanent secretary. He writes in French.

His first major work, Les Croisades vues par les Arabes (1983; The Crusades Through Arab Eyes), offered a documentary reconstruction of the Crusades from the perspective of Arab sources and established his position as a writer committed to cross-cultural historical testimony. His historical novels — Léon l'Africain (1986), Samarcande (1988), Les Jardins de lumière (1991), Le Rocher de Tanios (1993) — drew on Mediterranean, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern history to examine the encounter of cultures, the construction of identity across religious and civilizational boundaries, and the possibility of coexistence. Le Rocher de Tanios received the Prix Goncourt in 1993. His essays — Les Identités meurtrières (1998), Le Dérèglement du monde (2009) — engaged directly with the political stakes of cultural identity and with the global condition in the twenty-first century. His most recent novel, Le Naufrage des civilisations (2019), addressed the decline of the cosmopolitan culture of the Levant in which he grew up.