7 Translations & 7 Interviews in Memory of Elias Khoury, 1948-2024

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024 — Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died on Sunday at the age of 76, according to multiple news accounts.

Author of the acclaimed Gate of the Sun, he was one of the most celebrated novelists of his generation.

Khoury was born into a middle-class Christian family in Beirut in 1948, but became deeply committed to Palestinian liberation. As a teen, he worked as a literacy teacher and volunteer in Palestinian refugee camps, and he was nineteen when he traveled to Jordan to join Fatah, the armed wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Still, throughout all this, he never stopped writing fiction.

His second novel Little Mountain (tr. to English by maia tabet) was written in 1975-76, at the beginning of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war. “Everybody who read it thought that I was not a real revolutionary because I was fighting and at the same time criticizing the civil war in my writing,” he said in a 2001 interview with Sonja Mejcher. “There was a contradiction between the euphoric optimistic ideology we were living and what I was writing.”

The open discussion of civil war that began in Little Mountain continued in the almost nihilistic Gates of the City and grew fiercer in the bleak, quasi-detective novel White Masks, published in Arabic in 1981 and in English (trans. Maia Tabet) in 2010. By the time he wrote White Masks, Khoury said in his interview with Mejcher, “I was considered to be against the revolution. The PLO practically banned the book.”

And yet, despite the shifts that took place in Khoury’s writing and in his worldview during the construction of these early novels, the author remained loyal to his earliest convictions and conceptions of justice.

“The most important thing is to be loyal to your convictions,” Khoury said at the 2015 Shubbak Festival in London, in a conversation with novelist-academic Marina Warner. “Sometimes it’s tough, sometimes it’s impossible. It becomes very, very difficult. I remember this especially in the so-called War of the Mountains, which happened in 1984, when the Druze massacred the Christians. And of course we were in alliance with Walid Jumblatt and his party. And we felt so awkward, because our colleagues who stayed in the mountains…they were massacred.”

“You cannot leave blood in the streets and go away,” he added. “You must at least collect the blood.”

In his novels and his scholarship, he continued his commitment to collecting the blood.

It was with his 1998 novel, Gate of the Sun, that Khoury became an internationally celebrated writer, associated from them on with Palestine. The novel came out in English in 2006, translated by Humphrey Davies, and was among the first Arabic novels creating a new wave of translation into English.

Although Khoury taught for many years in New York City, his novels continued to center Lebanon and Palestine. His 2002 post-civil-war novel Yalo is perhaps his most frightening, an entanglement of writing, memory, rape, and torture. His tender, almost dream-like 2007 novel As Though She Were Sleeping is set in the 1930s and 1940s, and moves easily between cities that are now impossibly separate: parts of Palestine, Lebanon, what is now Israel. The epic Sinalcol (2012), returns to Lebanon’s civil war with echoing near-twin-brother characters.

His latest, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, is coming in the late Humphrey Davies’ translation from Archipelago Books in November.

His novels not only inspired adaptations into other media (such as the film of Gate of the Sun), but also a real “Gate of the Sun” village that was a challenge to Israeli occupation.

Also, as Mezna Qato notes on Twitter, “Elias Khoury was a brilliant writer of fiction and non-fiction but also such a deft editor, especially of the political and intellectual contributions of colleagues in Shu’un Filastiniyya (the PLO journal), see issues from 1975-1979 in particular.”

We will have more reflections on Khoury and his work. Until then:

7 from Khoury’s work in translation:

An excerpt from the novella The Smell of Soap, trans. Ghada Mourad

An excerpt from White Masks, trans. Maia Tabet

An excerpt from Gate of the Sun, trans. Humphrey Davies

An excerpt from Yalo, trans. Humphrey Davies

An excerpt from As Though She Were Sleeping, trans. Marilyn Booth

An excerpt from Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, trans. Humphrey Davies

An excerpt from Stella Maris: Children of the Ghetto 2, trans. Humphrey Davies

7 interviews and conversations

Elias Khoury, The Art of Fiction No. 233, a talk with Robyn Creswell

The necessity to forget — and remember, a talk with Sonja Mejcher

A conversation with Elias Khoury & Ilan Pappé

Interview with Elias Khoury at the Crossing Border Festival 2010

In conversation with Sophia Efthimiatou in Granta, 2013

At the Conrad Festival in Krakow, 2021

In L’Humanite in November 2023