Amin Maalouf Elected Member of the Académie Française

Jun 23, 2011


The Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, Prince of Asturias de las Letras, was today elected member of the Académie française, which will replace the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died in October 2009.


“Immortals”, as it is known to scholars in France, was reverted by Maalouf in the first ballot, according to “Le Monde”, which recalled that the author of the African “Leon”, had been candidate for a seat in 2004.


In 2007, he was also eligible for the title of academician, but he decided to retire after the discomfort which had led the Academy within its support to a manifesto proclaiming the death of la Francophonie.


Born on the 25th of February 1949 in Beirut, Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese author. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into many languages. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios (English translation of, Le Rocher de Tanios). He has also been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in its 2010 edition. He was elected at the Académie française on 23 June 2011, on seat 29.


Maalouf is the second of four children. His parents' families were from the Lebanese mountain village of Ain el Kabou. His parents married in Cairo in 1945, where Odette, his mother, was born of a Maronite Christian father from the village, who had left to work in Egypt, and a mother born in Turkey. Amin's father, Ruchdi, was from the Melkite Greek Catholic community. One of his ancestors was a priest whose son converted to become a Presbyterian parson. The parson's son (Maalouf's grandfather) was a "rationalist, anticlerical, probably a freemason, and refused to baptise his children". While the Protestant branch of the family sent their children to British or American schools, Maalouf's mother was a staunch Catholic who insisted on sending him to a French Jesuit school. He studied sociology at the Francophone Saint-Joseph University in Beirut.


He worked as the director of the Beirut-based daily newspaper An-Nahar until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when he moved to Paris, which became his permanent home.