Life and Career As Academic, Critic and Editor
Elias Khoury was born into a Greek Orthodox middle-class family in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyye district of Beirut. In 1967, as Lebanese intellectual life was increasingly becoming polarised, with the opposition taking on a radical Arab nationalist and pro-Palestinian hue, Khoury travelled to Jordan where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and then enlisted in Fatah, the largest resistance organisation in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. He left Jordan in 1970 after the Palestinian guerrilla forces in the kingdom were crushed in Black September and travelled to Paris to continue his studies. There he wrote a dissertation on the 1860 Lebanon conflict. After returning to Lebanon, he became a researcher with the Palestine Liberation Organization's research centre in Beirut. He took part in the Lebanese civil war that broke out in 1975, and was seriously injured, temporarily losing his eyesight.
Khoury's first major involvement on the Arab literary scene was as a member of the editorial board of the journal Mawaqif, which he joined in 1972. Other members included Adonis, Hisham Sharabi and, somewhat later, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. Of this group, Khoury later remarked that it was important, but marginal: "We were neither on the liberal right nor on the classical left. Intellectually speaking, we were very much linked to the Palestinian experience."
From 1975 to 1979 he was editor of Shu'un Filastin (Palestinian affairs), collaborating with Mahmoud Darwish, and from 1981 to 1982 editorial director of Al-Karmel. From 1983 to 1990 he was editorial director of the cultural section of Al-Safir. He has been editor of Al-Mulhaq, the cultural supplement of Al-Nahar, since its reappearance after the end of the civil war.
He has taught in Columbia University, New York, in the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese University, the Lebanese American University and New York University.
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