Throughout his life and in his 14 novels, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who has died aged 76 after a long illness, explored his region’s contemporary history, whether it was identity politics, social inequality and injustice, or the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians that he witnessed first-hand.
His best-known work, Gate of the Sun (1998), translated into English by Humphrey Davies, is both an epic love story between a husband and wife, and one of the first novels to describe the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, giving faces, names and histories to the voiceless.
Khoury used stories that he had collected over seven years from Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and testimonials from Palestinians who remained in the Galilee region, today part of Israel. Gate of the Sun was an act of love for the Palestinian people, Khoury said, and in it he wove those stories together to give the full sweep of Palestinian history. The novel has been translated into 14 languages and in 2004 was made into a film by the Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah.
Khoury was part of what is known as the civil war generation of Lebanon (1975-90), which includes writers such as Hanan al-Shaykh, Hoda Barakat, and Jabbour Douaihy, all of whose works were a significant departure from earlier Lebanese authors through their modern style and content. Khoury experimented with narration and form, as well as the way he wrote in fus’ha, or classical Arabic, bringing the language as close as possible to the spoken word, increasing its fluidity.
His first novel, On the Relations of the Circle (1975), was published the year the civil war began. He participated in the war with a leftist alliance, and was injured, losing his sight temporarily. In between fighting he wrote his second book, Little Mountain (1977), which describes the early years of the war through the eyes of three characters. In White Masks (1981), Khoury wrote about the social fragmentation and disintegration of Lebanese society undergoing the complexities of a civil war.
Born in Beirut, into a Christian middle-class family, he was the son of Adèle Abdelnour and Iskandar Khoury, who worked for Mobil Oil. He came of age in the 1960s and early 70s, when the city had become a flourishing intellectual and artistic regional capital. However, this was against a backdrop of sectarianism and profound economic inequality, deeply influenced by regional tensions.
While studying history at the Lebanese University in Beirut, in 1967 Khoury travelled to Jordan to work in a Palestinian refugee camp, then joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2017, Khoury said: “We trained in Syria, in the camps at Hama and Maysaloun, just off the Beirut- Damascus highway … Later on, we worked in the south of Lebanon as well as around Beirut.”
However, Khoury decided he wanted to become an “intellectual”, leaving for Paris in 1970 to study social history at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. There, he worked on a thesis about the 1840-60 Mount Lebanon war between the Druze and Maronite communities that provided a base for his subsequent writings on the civil war.
Two years later he returned to Lebanon where he worked at the Palestine Research Center and for its journal, Palestinian Affairs, where he became editor-in-chief in 1975. He was culture editor of the Lebanese daily As-Safir from 1983 to 1990 then, once the civil war ended, he ran the cultural supplement of the An-Nahar newspaper.
Khoury was actively involved in the region’s secular, leftwing intellectual scene, working with the poets Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, and the writer and critic Edward Said in New York, where Khoury taught Arabic literature at Columbia University (1980-81), then held the title of global distinguished professor at New York University (2000-14). He also taught at the University of London, and universities in Switzerland and Lebanon.
According to his French-language translator, Rania Samara, who worked with him for 25 years, Khoury was “someone who lived his Arab society to the fullest with his political positions and commitments. He was courageous and frank about everything he thought, and all this was reflected in his work. There was no dissociation between life and the man.”
Although he always supported the Palestinian people, Khoury never hesitated to criticise Arab leaders, including the PLO, and he sought to understand Israel, teaching himself Hebrew and reading Israeli novelists. Indeed, his Children of the Ghetto trilogy (2016-23) is set in Lydda, Palestine, which becomes Lod, Israel, where his Palestinian characters speak Hebrew, but also in New York and Warsaw, where Jewish and Israeli histories are explored.
The trilogy characteristically follows a form of circuitous storytelling – Khoury spoke of his love for the One Thousand and One Nights, and the infinity and continuity of Scheherazade’s stories. His own stories often feel as if each narrator is passing a baton to the next. The protagonist of the three books in the trilogy, My Name Is Adam (2016), Star of the Sea (2019) and A Man Like Me (2023), Adam Dannoun, is a complex character whom Samara thought that Khoury most resembled, saying: “He didn’t know if the character resembled him or if he was the character. We no longer know who the author is and who the reader is. The reader is the author’s mirror. He loved this dizzying kind of game.”
In A Man Like Me, the character of Khalil, who originally appeared in Gate of the Sun attempting to revive a comatose leader of the Palestinian resistance by telling him stories, resurfaces, circling back to Khoury’s previous work.
As well as his novels and articles, Khoury wrote a collection of short stories, three plays and a number of literary studies.
Throughout his recent illness and nearly year-long hospitalisation suffering from ischaemia, Khoury wrote articles for the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. He was also the editor of the Arabic Journal of Palestine Studies and was working on a novel set in contemporary Beirut.
Two months before his death, Khoury wrote in Al-Quds al-Arabi: “Can he whose ordeal has been rooted in the land since the beginning of the Palestinian resistance lose heart? Gaza and Palestine have been savagely attacked for nearly a year, yet they continue to resist, unwavering. A model from which I have learned to love life every day.”
He is survived by his wife, Najla Jraissati Khoury, a writer and researcher whom he married in 1971, his daughter, Abla, his son, Talal, a grandson, Yamen, and three siblings, Samira, Souad and Michel.
• Elias Khoury, author, editor and journalist, born 12 July 1948; died 15 September 2024
