Amin Maalouf - Biography

Biography

Maalouf is the second of four children. His parents' families were from the Lebanese mountain village of Ain el Kabou. His parents married in Cairo in 1945, where Odette, his mother, was born of a Maronite Christian father from the village, who had left to work in Egypt, and his mother born in Turkey. Amin's father, Ruchdi, was from the Melkite Greek Catholic community. One of his ancestors was a priest whose son converted to become a Presbyterian parson. The parson's son (Maalouf's grandfather) was a "rationalist, anticlerical, probably a freemason, and refused to baptise his children". While the Protestant branch of the family sent their children to British or American schools, Maalouf's mother was a staunch Catholic who insisted on sending him to Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour- a French Jesuit school. He studied sociology at the Francophone Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.

Maalouf’s first book, “The Crusades Through Arab Eyes,” examines the period from an Arab perspective.

He worked as the director of the Beirut-based daily newspaper An-Nahar until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when he moved to Paris, which became his permanent home.

Besides novels, he has written two opera librettos and several works on non-fiction, of which 'Crusades through Arab Eyes' is probably the best known.

In 2010 he received the Prince of Asturias Award laureate for Letters for his work, an intense mix of suggestive language, historic affairs in a Mediterranean mosaic of languages, cultures and religions and stories of tolerance and reconciliation.

Maalouf has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), the University of Tarragona Rovira i Virgili (Spain) and the University of Evora (Portugal).