The death on Monday of Elias Khoury in his hometown of Beirut at the age of 76 marks the end of one of the Arab world’s most distinguished literary careers, marked by devotion to the Palestinian cause and dialogue with Western literature. One of a tiny handful of Arab writers to be interviewed in The Paris Review, Khoury is perhaps best known for his 1998 epic of the flight and plight of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Bab Al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), made into an eponymous two-part film by his friend the Egyptian director Youssri Nasrallah in 2005.

Khoury was born into a Greek Orthodox family in the Christian Beirut district of Achrafieh, and graduated from the Lebanese University, where he studied history, in 1971. He had lived in Jordan, where he enlisted with Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, after the 1967 defeat to Israel, leaving in the course of the Palestinian exodus following Black September of 1970. He had evidently been completing the necessary course work remotely, since he also earned his PhD in social history from the University of Paris only a year after his graduation, in 1972. When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, the year he published his first novel, On the Relations of the Circle, Khoury fought with the pro-Palestinian Lebanese National Movement.

As well as two short story collections, plays, screenplays and criticism, Khoury wrote 12 novels including White Masks (1982) and Yalu (2002), several of which earned him a very prominent place in the annals of Arabic literature in English translation. They were translated into many languages besides, Hebrew included. Khoury was a visiting professor at numerous universities in the US, where he spent half the year. He edited the Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar’s seminal and prestigious cultural supplement, Al-Mulhaq (“The Supplement”), from 1993 to 2009. His awards include the 2000 Prize of Palestine for Gate of the Sun, the 2007 Al- Owais Award, the 2008 Prix du roman arabe for As Though She Were Sleeping, and the 2016 Mahmoud Darwish Award.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly