Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was Greek from Smyrna, and her father was a high-ranking Ottoman official from Damascus. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy. She became a painter. Thanks to her involvement in the poets' movement against the Vietnam War, she began writing poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as a cultural editor. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her prose work "Sitt Marie-Rose" was published in Paris. That same year, she returned to California. Her poems have been set to music by contemporary composers and presented at international festivals. Her theatrical works have been performed worldwide. Among other projects, she wrote the French text for American director Bob Wilson's multilingual opera "Civil Wars" in 1985. Her poem "Jenin" was adapted and presented at the Attis Theatre in Athens in 2005. A work based on her poem "To Be In a Time of War," with texts by Heiner Muller, was performed at the Forum Freies Theater in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Beirut in 2011. She participated with her visual art in the 13th documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. Her most significant accolades include: the France-Pays Arabes Award for "Sitt Marie Rose" (1977); the Arab American Book Award for her body of work and the PEN Oakland Award for "Master of the Eclipse" (2010); the California Book Award for Poetry for the collection "Sea and Fog" and the Lambda Literary Award for her body of work as a lesbian author (2013). In 2014, she was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. She lives in California, Paris, Beirut, and Skopelos.