An Exciting New Lebanese Voice, Now in French
On Souhaib Ayoub’s Tripoli
By Olivia Snaije
This October will see the release of Lebanese writer Souhaib Ayoub’s second novel, Le Loup de la famille (The Wolf of the Family), in Stéphanie Dujols’ beautifully fluid translation. Originally published as Zi’b al-‘a’ila in 2024 by Hachette Antoine/Naufal, the French publication is an event for several reasons, not least because an exciting new voice has arrived in French. Ayoub’s first novel, Rajol Min Satin (Satin Man), 2018, will also be published by Actes Sud.
Although based in Paris for the past ten years, Ayoub’s novels are deeply rooted in his city of birth, Tripoli, Lebanon’s “second capital.” Founded in 700 BC, the once-prosperous city—now the country’s poorest—appears infrequently in contemporary literature. There are a few Tripoli-based novels, such as the late Jabbour Douaihy’s The American Quarter and Jana Elhassan’s All the Women Inside Me and poems, like those of Zeina Hashem Beck, that envision Tripoli. But far more Lebanese literary works are set in Beirut.
Yet once you read Souhaib Ayoub’s novels, you will have been to Tripoli. Indeed, you might feel as though you have entered a portal to Tripoli’s entrails, lived through a few decades of history and many meals, been spat back out again, and all you want to do is find another portal to climb back into this fierce and magical city.
Still, before getting to The Wolf of the Family, a few biographical details are necessary because, as Ayoub says, before he began writing, “I was a character in a book; I was always on the street, like a small-time hoodlum.”
Ayoub grew up in the low-income neighborhood of El-Qobbeh where orange trees flourished along the banks of the Abu Ali River. Nearby was the Lebanese army base, the Lebanese University, and the public hospital where Ayoub was born prematurely at seven months in 1989.
The youngest in a family of seven, the only books at home were Islamic texts. “Where I come from, it’s not very inspiring in a cultural sense, but I was given something more important—the neighbors were storytellers, and there were stories everywhere.”
Ayoub watched old Egyptian films at a neighbor’s, which fueled his imagination. Fridays, women would come to his mother’s house to get waxed. “There weren’t very many taboos.”
He began reading Arabic classics as a teenager, encouraged by two women in his high-school library. By this time, Ayoub was already supporting himself, working in a bakery and writing articles for local papers where he covered the news. When he was sixteen, he met Jabbour Douaihy at the café Pain d’Or, where the author would work on his books. Ayoub introduced himself and said he wanted to write. “Jabbour said, ‘Ok, show me your texts,’ and after that he started an informal, free, private literature workshop for me.”
Ayoub began studying sociology at the Lebanese university but wasn’t in class much as he continued to work as a journalist. He was traveling back and forth between Tripoli and Beirut, writing for An Nahar, when he met the poet, Akl Awit. Awit played an important role in his literary education, according to Ayoub: “He gave me advice that until today has been useful: read, read, read. Then write, then tear it up and start again.”
Awit introduced Ayoub to other writers, including Hoda Barakat, who Ayoub remains close with today in Paris, and who helps and encourages him with his writing, he says.
In time, working the night shift as an editor at Al Hayat, he met the late poet Joseph Daaboul, who was a proofreader at the paper. They would take a break during the night and sit outside next to the Roman ruins in Beirut and read poetry together.
“Thanks to the generosity of novelists and journalists in Beirut, the world of books was opened up to me,” said Ayoub.
Another essential feature of his personal education, he says, was his encounter with the psychotherapist Nayla Karamé Majdalani (married to the novelist Charif Majdalani), who also introduced him to François Truffaut’s films, leading to a long-lasting passion for film.
In 2013, he began writing his first novel, Satin Man, which he completed in France after leaving Lebanon in 2015. Satin Man is the first in a series of books that Ayoub has or will set in Tripoli. In just over 100 pages, Ayoub explores the social and historical complexities of the city, loosely shaped around the life of a queer man whose mother may have been a Jewish Tripolitan singer, Gloria Mizrahi.
Tripoli is once again the microcosm in which The Wolf in the Family is set, although Ayoub also touches on Bedouin tribes through his character Chamsé Al Sabe’. Divided into five parts, the novel opens in 2013 with Hassan, Chamsé Al Sabe’s grandson, as narrator. Hassan is a silent teenager who lives with his family in the Olabi building and roams the streets of Tripoli.
We are then brought back in time to 1965 to Chamsé Al Sabe’s story, which begins in a Bedouin camp. She makes a daring escape from her arranged marriage and arrives in Tripoli where she immediately gives birth to twins, Ziad and Jelnar. She is given a space to live in the Khanké, an Ottoman building that serves as a refuge for divorced or abandoned women, and it is here that she rebuilds her identity as a Tripolitan.
Each section of the novel is like a tree with branches that delves in to the nooks and crannies of the city and explores a wide and rich range of characters. Clearly, as Ayoub says, his inspiration for his writing “comes from people and their inner lives.”
It is also grounded in his experience growing up in a city where half the population lives in extreme poverty. “Poverty is a great treasure and a gift,” says Ayoub. “My stories are not about injustice and social class, but simply about humanity.”
Ayoub likes to think of the skeleton of his novel like the labyrinthine Mameluk architecture of Tripoli. “You turn down one street, and into another, and then there’s an impasse,” Ayoub explains. “Western readers like a clear narrative thread, they like to know what’s going on, but I hate linear narratives.”
Ayoub’s characters face many challenges besides poverty such as rape, violence and gruesome murders, but they persist. They are, like Ayoub’s writing, remarkably courageous and uninhibited: When Hassan’s aunt Jelnar brings him to a sheikh because she believes he might have been under the influence of a djinn at birth, the sheikh washes him with water that has been blessed, and Hassan has his first sexual experience.
Hassan’s father Ziad, when he is younger, has a passionate love story with a transgender prostitute called Dolce Vita. Dolce Vita, based on a real person, is one of the most affecting characters in the novel. Confident, fierce, and street smart, she is capable of loving deeply. Ayoub says he may bring her back in another book, and that he might do the same for several other female characters, including Gloria Mizrahi, from Satin Man.
“I know it’s not an easy read,” says Ayoub. “There are many layers and it’s very dense.”
But Ayoub is able to remedy the density—just when the novel begins to feel slightly overcrowded, he relieves the reader with descriptions of delicious meals or street food; it’s culinary comic relief. “In my city, food means showing love and sharing.”
In the original Arabic text, Ayoub says he likes to give the language a new twist. He revisits old and forgotten words that the poor use and that were originally in fus’ha. He also inserts Tripolitan dialect into the text.
“I want a literature that asks questions; I want people to dream and reflect and imagine. To doubt, even. Writing doesn’t end with the writer; it continues with the reader.”
Ayoub is working on several novels, one set in Tripoli, and the other in the rural area of the Akkar region in northern Lebanon. He is also moving to Germany for a year as one of the 2026 fellows in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.