Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf

Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf was honored in1993 with the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncour, awarded for his novel "Le Rocher de Tanios". Maalouf was described by the French press as "the great artisan of the legend" who "belongs to a creed of writers who restore and invent worlds in the color of their dreams." Amin Maalouf was born in 1949 in Lebanon. After graduating in politics and sociology from Saint Joseph University in Beirut, Maalouf worked in journalism at the Beirut daily newspaper An-Nahar. In1976, as the situation in Lebanon deteriorated, Maalouf, his wife Andrée, and their children emigrated to France, where they still live.

One of contemporary world literature's most celebrated cross-cultural prophets of tolerance and understanding across difference, Maalouf started his career in fictional (Middle Eastern) history with an investigation into the Crusades from the viewpoint of the Arabs, making his name with Leon l'africain (1986), and consolidating his success upon receiving the coveted Prix de Goncourt for Le rocher de Tanios (1993), a temporary departure from his usual trademark style -- more autobiographical and less concerned with the nooks and crannies of Oriental history, concentrating instead on the modern-day Lebanese predicament -- and, in Le premiére siecle aprés Beatrice (1992), trying his hand at literary science fiction as well.

Le périple de Baldassare, his seventh novel, thus merely sustains a personal but broad-ranging literary achievement -- and one that, in its own way, confirms the veracity of Hussein's early prophecy about the future of Arab culture. Maalouf, after all, is respected in both the West and the Arab world although, in his designation as "the Arabs' ambassador to the West," one sometimes catches a whiff of the Orientalist and the exotic, the adjuncts most frequently employed to explain Eastern success in the West. But in so far as it is an accusation, "I don't care about it, to be honest," Maalouf told Al-Wasat's Nagwa Othman. "It's true that I hold on to my cultural belongings, and am proud of the various components of my identity, which I wholeheartedly adopt. I am careful to retain all connections to my early cultural genesis -- my links with Lebanon, the Arab world, Mediterranean civilisation. But at the same time I uphold my intimate relationship with France, Europe and the Western world."

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