Elias Khoury

Khoury fought for Palestinian factions in the early years of the Lebanese civil war, was wounded, and turned afterwards to a career as novelist, critic, and longtime editor of the cultural supplement of al-Nahar. His fiction is dense, unstable, and oral — built out of stories told by characters to other characters, with no obvious authorial voice in the centre.

Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun, 1998) is a sprawling novel told by a Palestinian doctor to his comatose father-in-law in a Beirut hospital, recounting the entire history of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon since 1948. It is widely considered the most ambitious and humane novel of the Palestinian experience, and was filmed by Yousry Nasrallah in a four-and-a-half-hour version that played at Cannes.

Khoury's later novels — Yalo (2002), As Though She Were Sleeping (2007), Children of the Ghetto (2016) — continue his interest in what storytelling can and cannot do for historical wounds. He taught at NYU for many years and edited the major Palestinian intellectual journal al-Karmel after Mahmoud Darwish's death. He died in Beirut in September 2024 at seventy-six.