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Elias Khoury – a huge loss

Elias Khoury – A huge loss

On this day, 15 September 2024, the news broke that Elias Khoury is no more.  What a loss to the many different worlds and communities that his writings and ideas and struggles reached.  He wrote so much, so vividly – as if he had experienced everything himself – creating such an impression and such a far-reaching influence in many different languages.  He will be so missed, even though he lives on in his worlds and books.  

Elias Khoury was born in Beirut in 1948 and was prominent as a public intellectual. A polymath literary critic, journalist, novelist, playwright, academic and intellectual, he became a journalist and literary critic after studying Sociology and History at the Lebanese University, Beirut, and the University of Paris.

He worked as assistant editor and then managing editor of Shu’oun Filastinia (Palestinian Affairs). He also served on the editorial board of the iconic literary magazines Mawaqif – with Adonis – and Al-Karmel with Mahmoud Darwish. Later he became editor of the cultural pages of As-Safir newspaper, and then editor of “Mulhaq”, An-Nahar’s weekly literary supplement.

Since 1975 he published fourteen novels, with many of them published in translation into different languages. In addition to his novels, Elias Khoury has published four books of literary criticism, three plays, two screenplays, and a collection of short stories.

In 2000 he was awarded the Prize of Palestine for his novel Gate of the Sun, and in 2006 its English translation by Humphrey Davies won the inaugural Banipal Arabic Literary Translation Prize. For details of that award click here.

The translation was also named Best Book of the Year by Le Monde Diplomatique, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and a Notable Book by The New York Times.

In December 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Owais Prize for fiction writing.

In January 2010 the translation by Humphrey Davies of Elias Khoury's novel Yalo won the fifth year's award of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. For details of that award click here.

He has had a distinguished academic career as a visiting professor at both Columbia and New York Universities and at the Lebanese American University, as Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies at the University of New York, also teaching at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut. 

In Autumn 2001,  Banipal 12, then an A4-sized magazine of 80 pages, featured excerpts from a long interview with him by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, the full interview published in that same year in a study of Elias Khoury's works, entitled Geschichten über Geschichten von Erinnerung im Romanwerk von Elias Khoury. (Reichert, 2001 Series: Literaturen im Kontext 8). 

Click to read the excerpts in Banipal 12.

In the first year of Covid-19 pandemic, and following the 4 August 2020 massive explosion in Beirut’s port which made 300,000 left homeless, over 200 dead, and 7,000 injured, Banipal 69 (Autumn/Winter 2020) published Elias Khoury’s essay on that devastated city, The City of Strangers. Originally published in Arabic in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniya 124 (Autumn 2020) as part of that issue’s special section “Salute to Beirut”, it was published, in English translation by Humphrey Davies, in Banipal 69, in agreement with the author. Click to read The City of Strangers.

Twenty years after that interview in Banipal 12, Banipal 67, (Spring 2020) assembled a major feature, entitled Elias Khoury, The Novelist, with translations from his works, book reviews and especially commissioned articles on his work and his place in Arabic and world literature from Maia Tabet, Maher Jarrar, Abdo Wazen, Saif al-Rahbi, Aida Fahmawi Watad, Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Raef Zreik, Fakhri Saleh, and Paula Haydar.   A fuller description of the feature can be read in the News article published online at the time Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist. 

Several of the essays are already available to read online on Banipal's website as selections from the issue.

Click for Mai Tabet: Discovering Elias Khoury
Mai Tabet has translated two of Elias Khoury's novels: Little Mountain and White Masks.

Click for Maher Jarrar: Language and Textual Strategies: A Reading of Elias Khoury’s Novels
Maher Jarrar's opening paragraph to his essay seems even more relevant today, 15 September 2024 – the day Elias Khoury left this earth, than it was in 2020:

At times when the pain of the Arab people has become unbearable, Elias Khoury has proven himself a critical thinker with command of diverse forms of expression, whose voice emanates from a mind committed to liberation struggles and who incorporates these struggles into his everyday work. In this sense, he exemplifies the three characteristics that Edward Said called for in an intellectual: daring to speak truth to power, bearing witness to oppression and suffering, and being a voice of dissent in the country in which he or she is based during clashes with ruling powers and institutions.

The essay ends, with an equally thoughtful estimation of Elias Khoury's boundless empathy and courage:

Wars have no victors, his work seems to say; we are all losers in war. We are all killed in them and are all strangers; to be alienated is what it means to be human. And at the heart of the existential questions raised by Khoury’s texts is Palestine, beset by bloodshed, political debauchery and betrayal. In them, Palestine becomes the central question, an issue that can fuse together all peoples and all strangers in their search for meaning, freedom and human dignity.