Today, Monday, the Google search engines website celebrates the poet and writer, Etel Adnan (1925 – 2021), who was born in Beirut, Lebanon. The academic magazine MELUS described her in 2003 as the most famous Arab-American writer and currently lives in Paris.
She grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a society that mainly spoke Arabic. She was educated in French schools for nuns, and French was the language in which she wrote her first works. She also learned English in her youth, to be the language in which she would write all her works in the future.
She obtained a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, then headed to the United States to resume her studies there at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. She also studied the philosophy of art at the Dominican University in California, after which she worked as a lecturer at several universities across the United States of America.
Etel Adnan returned to Lebanon to work as a journalist and cultural editor in one of the Lebanese newspapers, a newspaper published in the French language in Beirut. She also contributed to building the cultural section of the newspaper and added drawings and illustrations. Her period of work in the newspaper was distinguished by editorials in which she commented on the most important political issues.
Etel Adnan is also talented in drawing. She has exhibited her work in several international exhibitions. In 2012, she displayed a series of her brightly colored paintings at the Documenta exhibition in Germany, and in 2014, she displayed a group of her paintings and works at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Etel Adnan wrote many novels, most notably “Lady Marie Rose,” which won a prestigious award from France in 1977. He also wrote poetry collections, most notably “The Sea and the Mist,” which challenged the California Poetry Prize in 2013.
Her creative journey was crowned with more awards and honors, including the Arab American Book Award in 2010, and she won the Lambda Prize for Literature in 2013, and in 2014 she was named Knight of Literature by the French government.