Adonis

Adonis is the literary pseudonym of Ali Ahmad Said Esber, who was born in 1930 in northern Syria, near the Mediterranean coast. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Damascus. Before publishing his first work, "Songs of Mihyar the Damascene" (1960), which became a milestone in Arabic poetry, he was involved in translating renowned European poets and intellectuals into Arabic. In 1971, as a professor at the University of Beirut, he began traveling worldwide, giving lectures on Arabic culture and poetry. In 1980, he sought refuge in Paris to escape the civil war in Lebanon and taught Arabic language and literature for a year at the Sorbonne. As a deputy permanent representative of the Arab League to UNESCO, he has also taught poetry at the Universities of Geneva and Princeton. In 2011, he was honored with the Goethe Prize, and his name was widely discussed for the Nobel Prize in Literature (which was ultimately awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer). In August of the same year, he called on Bashar al-Assad to resign from the presidency of his country, aiming to end the bloody civil war in Syria.