A short life of the author
Elias Khoury (1948–2024) was born on 12 July 1948 in Ashrafiyya, Beirut, Lebanon. He studied at the Lebanese University and the Sorbonne. He fought in the Lebanese Civil War alongside the Palestinian resistance and edited the cultural pages of An-Nahar, Beirut’s leading newspaper.
Life and Career
Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun, 1998) — his masterpiece — is an epic novel structured as a series of stories told by Khalil, a nurse in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, to his comatose patient Abu Salem. Through hundreds of interwoven narratives, the novel reconstructs the Palestinian experience of dispossession, exile, and resistance from 1948 onward. It is one of the great novels about Palestine.
Yalo (2002) — about a young man on trial in Beirut — and the Children of the Ghetto trilogy (My Name Is Adam, 2016; The Star of the Sea, 2019; A State Beyond the Sea) — about a Palestinian writer attempting to tell the story of the Lydda death march — extended his life-long project of narrating Palestine.
Major Works and Themes
Khoury wrote about Palestine, the Lebanese Civil War, memory, and the relationship between storytelling and survival. His fiction is formally complex — polyphonic, fragmented, built on oral narrative traditions.
Key Works
- Gate of the Sun (1998)
- My Name Is Adam (2016)
Collecting Khoury
English translations (Archipelago Books, MacLehose Press) bring $15–$30. Arabic originals are available from Beirut publishers. Khoury died in 2024.