Etel Adnan is a writer and painter born in Lebanon in 1925. She lives in Paris. She works poetry, novels, essays, epistolary stories, autobiography and painting. Born to an Ottoman...
Etel Adnan is a writer and painter born in Lebanon in 1925. She lives in Paris. She works poetry, novels, essays, epistolary stories, autobiography and painting. Born to an Ottoman Muslim father and a Greek Christian mother, she grew up in an Arabic-speaking world and received a French religious education. Her first language of writing is the French. In the 1950s, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, then went to the United States to continue her studies at U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy in California. She returned to Beirut in 1972 where she stayed until 1976 to write for several dailies. She also uses English, which she uses in most of her works. She is also a painter, and her works, in small format, exalt colour. "Colour is the sign of the existence of life. ...I exist because I see color. Sometimes, at other times, it's as if I don't exist, when colour seems an impregnable, inaccessible and foreign fortress. But one cannot possess colour, only accept its reality. And if one cannot possess the colour, no possession is possible. For anything (1)". She regularly exhibits at the Galerie Lelong & Co gallery in Paris. Her work has been exhibited sever time, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, the White Cube in Hong Kong, and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, among others. She is also Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
