Adnan, Etel, 1925-2021,
Lebanese-American author and artist, b. Beirut, Lebanon. Adnan studied at the Sorbonne and did
postgraduate work at the Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, and Harvard, and then taught aesthetics at
Dominican College (1958-72). She began painting in 1959 and writing poetry in the late '60s.
Adnan returned to Lebanon (1972-75), working as a journalist, and then moved to Paris, where
she wrote her best-known novel, Sitt Marie Rose (1978), which was based on
the story of a woman who was kidnapped during the Lebanese Civil War. She also wrote poetry,
plays, and journalism. In her later life, she lived in California and then returned to Paris,
becoming known as an abstract artist in the 2010s. Her artwork has been the subject of several
major exhibitions around the world, including at New York's Guggenheim Museum(2021-22). She was named a
Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (2014), France's highest cultural award.
See her nonfiction work, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
(2005); poetry, The Arab Apocalypse (1980), Sea and Fog
(2013), Shifting the Silence (2020).
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