Lebanese journalist and novelist, whose native language was Arabic but who writes in French. Most of Amin Maalouf's books have a historical setting, and like in the works of Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, they mix fascinating historical facts with fantasy and philosophical ideas. In an interview Maalouf said that his role as a writer is to create "positive myths". 

"At this moment I feel sheltered in my high mountain lair, and my hand scarcely trembles over the blank pages of this old indexed note-book, to which I am about to confide my scraps of truth. I even experience once more, as I recall certain images of the past, a feeling of lightheartedness which delights me so much that I momentarily forget the tragedy which I am supposed to relate. Is not one of the virtues of writing to be able to set down the trivia and the exceptional on the same flat sheet of paper? Nothing in a book seems any more profound than the ink in which it is written." (The First Century After Beatrice by Amin Maalouf, translated by Dorothy S. Blair, New York: George Braziller, 1995, p. 4; originally published in France by Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1992)

Amin Maalouf, a Catholic Arab, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, into a cultured family, which had a tradition of business, too. His father, Ruchdi Maalouf, was a writer, teacher, and journalist. Odette, Maalouf's mother, was from a Maronite Christian family. In Origins: A Memoir (2004) Maalouf tells of his grandfather Botros, a schoolteacher and failed businessman, and his younger brother Gebrayel, who built up a successful retail enterprise in Havana. Maalouf was told that he died in mysterious circumstances.

"Throughout my childhood, I witnessed the joy and pride of my parents when they mentioned friends of different faiths or different countries," Maalouf wrote in the 'Prologue' of Le naufrage des civilizations (2019, Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way). "It was no more that a barely perceptible inflection in their voices. But it conveyed a message." Maalouf attended French Jesuit schools in Beirut and after studying sociology and economics, he continued the long family tradition and became a journalist.

At the age of 22, Maalouf started to work for the leading Beirut daily an-Nahar and travelled in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, and Algeria, often covering wars and other conflicts. In 1975, frightened by Muslim and PLO strength, Christian militias attacked Muslims, which led to civil war. The horrors of war entered Maalouf's own homeland and in 1977 he emigrated with his wife and three children to Paris, where he has lived ever since. Maalouf has said, "if somebody had given me a weapon, maybe I'd have become a murderer." ('The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf review – exile and homecoming' by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, 30 January, 2021)

Changing his language, Maalouf continued to work as a journalist. "Journalism  is present in everything that I've done: sometimes by a certain way of telling a story, sometimes by the way that I address myself to my reading public, the way in which I pose a question . . . " ('Maalouf, Amin' by E. M. [Edward Moran], World Authors 1990-1995, edited by Clifford Thompson, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1999, p. 479)

Part of the "Young African" press corps, he wrote for Jeune Afrique, An-nahar Arabe et International, and other periodicals. After moving to France Maalouf travelled little for several years. In 1994 he visited Lebanon – for the first time since the 1970s. Most of his time Maalouf spent in Paris or on one of the Channel Islands where he wrote his novels in a little fisherman's house. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983), Maalouf's first book, was born from his realization, that there is a profound lack of mutual understanding between East and West. Although Western research has scrutinized the religious zeal, and political and economic maneuvers behind the Crusades (1096-1291), this work, in which he used Arab accounts, brought to the clash of Eastern and Western cultures a fresh and lesser examined perspective. Both by reviewers and Maalouf have called the work as a "historical essay".

Maalouf chose a quotation from Saladin as the motto of the part one, 'Invasion (1096-1100)': "Regard the Franj! Behold with what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war." Maalouf argued that the West became identified with forces of superiority and Arabs were traumatized by their encounter with an alien culture. ". . . throughout the Crusades, the Arabs refused to open their own society to ideas from the West. And this, in all likelihood, was the most disastrous effect of the aggression of which they were the victims. . . . Although the epoch of the Crusades ignited a genuine economic and cultural revolution in Western Europe, in the Orient these holy wars led to long centuries of decadence and obscurantism." (The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, translated by Jon Rothschild, New York: Shockeb Books, 1984, p. 264) Maalouf's views have been reviewed by a number of writers dealing with the theme of crusades and the conflict between Islam and Christianity.

Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way took up critically certain themes from Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1996), but Maalouf underlined the need of cooperation between Europeans and Arabs in constructing a better world. 

Maalouf's characters often find themselves in conflict with the beliefs of their surroundings and time, as the Mesopotamian prophet Mani (c. 216-276) in The Gardens of Light (1991), who preached his tolerant doctrine of 'The Gospel of Light', or the restless traveller Hassan Al-Wazzan from Leo the African (1986), a geographer who roamed Africa and the Mediterranean lands in the 16th-century.

Actually very little is known of the real person behind his myth. Leo's narration of his life, from Granada, his birthplace, to his residence in Fez, echoes Maalouf's own years in exile and the fate of his own native country: "Before Fez, I had never set foot in a city, never observed the swarming activity of the alleyways, never felt that powerful breath on my face, like the wind from the sea, heavy with cries and smells. Of course, I was born in Granada, the stately capital of the kingdom of Andalus, but it was already late in the century, and I knew it only in its death agonies, emptied of its citizens and its souls, humiliated, faded, and when I left our quarter of al-Baisin it was no longer anything for my family but a vast encampment, hostile and ruined." (Leo the African, translated by Peter Sluglett, London: Abacus, 1994, p. 83) In Rome, Leo completed his magnum opus, the famous description of African geography. It is believed that he wrote the work first in Arabic. In 1550 it was published in Italian under the title Della descrittione dell'Africa et delle cose notabli che ivi sono.

In 1993 Maalouf received the Prix de Goncourt for his novel Le rocher de tanios (The Rock of Tanios). The acclaimed story-within-a-story was set in the 19th century Lebanon. Its central characters are Sheikh Francis, a Christian Arab, and the sheikh's illegitimate offspring, Tanios. The title of the book refers to a peculiar rock formation, looking like a great stone chair, that dominates the Lebanese village of Kfaryabda.

Samarkand (1989) is an attempt to show how past events resonate with the present. Maalouf spins fact and fiction around the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam (1048–1131). The jewel-encrusted edition of the Rubaiyyat is claimed to have vanished on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. Maalouf gives the reader an exotic and vivid picture of 11th-century Persia, with assassins and intrigues, and returns to it 900 years later through the eyes of a half-French, half-American Benjamin O. Lesage searching for Khayyam's Manuscript. In the final chapter Lesage makes his way to the United States on board the Titanic.

Maalouf has regularly used fantasy elements in his novels, but The First Century After Beatrice (1992) was his first full-length futuristic tale, in which female birth has become increasingly rare due to a new fertility drug. The scarcity of girls and women upsets the balance of sexes, and baby girls are kidnapped to be sold in countries where there is a shortage. Maalouf touches on several themes – the antagonism between the rich, technologically advanced Western countries and the poor South, corrupt science and sexual discrimination. "And the journalist? Where does his passion lie? Is it solely in the observation of human butterflies, human spiders, their hunting and their love affairs? No. Your job becomes sublime, incomparable, when it allows you to read the image of the future in the present, for the entire future is to be found in the present, but masked, coded, in a dispersed order." (Ibid., p. 36)

The protagonist in Ports Of Call (1999), Ossyane Ketabdar, travels in the 1930s to Paris to study. When World War II reaches France, he abandons his passivity, and becomes a Resistance hero, fulfilling his family traditions. After returning to Beirut, he marries Clara, a Jewish woman. But now the wars tear families apart.

Behind the story of Balthasar's Odyssey (2000) is the number 666 and the year of 1666, the "year of the Apocalypse", which Maalouf explores through the experiences of Balthasar Embriaco, an Italian bookseller. With his companions he tries to track down a book, Abu-Maher al-Mazandarani's The Unveiling of the Hidden Name, which may contain the hundredth name of God. In Islam there are 99 names for God. To know the 100th, the name that may be missing from the Koran, is to ensure one's salvation.

Balthasar is a Catholic but he views organized religion sceptically, and with his observations he comes close to a modern intellectual. Balthasar finds the book and loses it, twice, and almost perishes in the Great Fire of London. "What is common to Maalouf's wide-ranging works . . . is his apparent belief that through examining and understanding a particular historical period we can gain a better understanding of our present time." ('Points east' by Ian Sansom, The Guardian, October 12, 2002)

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho based her first opera L'amour de loin (Love From Afar) on Maalouf's libretto about a distant love of a 12th-century troubadour, Jaufré Rudel, for a countess in Tripoli. The opera was produced in Salzburg (2000) and in Paris (2001) at Chatelet theater, directed by Peter Sellars. "Idealized love is a well-worn theme," wrote Anthony Tommasini in his review, "but Mr. Maalouf has found a fresh way to revisit it. Mr. Maalouf's words invite music, and Ms. Saariaho has provided a lushly beautiful score, structured in five continuous acts lasting two hours." ('OPERA REVIEW; A Prince Idealizes His Love From Afar,' The New York Times, August 17, 2000)

Maalouf has also written lyrics to Saariaho's songs, 'Quatre instants,' which were performed by the opera singer Karita Mattila in April 2004. Saariaho's second opera, based on Maalouf's libretto Adriana Mater, premiered in 2006 in Paris. Set in a civil-war torn country, it tells of a mother, who is a victim of a rape, her child, and the choice between violence and nonviolence. Maalouf was also commissioned to write the libretto for Saariaho's opera Émilie, drawing on the colorful life of Voltaire's mistress, the physicist and astronomer Émilie du Chatelet (1706-1749), who translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French. The opera opened in March 2010, in Lyon, with Karita Mattila singing in the title role. 

For further reading: 'Maalouf, Amin' by E.M. [Edward Moran], in World Authors 1990-1995, ed. by Clifford Thompson (1999); 'The Rewriting of History in Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes' by , C. Bourget, in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol 30; Numb 2 (2006); Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, edited by Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M.E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky (2009); Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of "the Middle Ages" Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (2009); Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing by Nobert Bugeja (2012); L'écriture d'Amin Maalouf à la lisière de deux langues: une approche pluridisciplinaire by Maya Khaled (2017); 'Géocritique d'un espace "navicule" dans Un fauteuil sur la Seine d'Amin Maalouf' by Lamia Mecheri, in Le territoire littéraire de la Seine: géocritique d'un fleuve, edited by Sonia Anton (2022)

Selected works:

• Les Croisades vues par les Arabes, 1983 (published in France by Jean-Claude Lattes, Paris)
  - The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (translated by Jon Rothschild, 1984)
• Léon l'Africain, 1986
  - Leo the African (UK title: translated by Peter Sluglett, 1988) / Leo Africanus (US title: translated by Peter Sluglett, 1989)
  - Leo Afrikkalainen (suomentanut Anna-Maija Viitanen, 2011) 
• Samarcande, 1988
  - Samarkand (translated by Russell Harris, 1992)
  - Samarkand (suomentanut Annikki Suni, 2009)
• Les Jardins de lumière, 1991
  - The Gardens of Light (translated by Dorothy S. Blair, 1996)
  - Valon puutarhat (suomentanut Anna-Maija Viitanen, 2014)
  
• Le Premier Siècle après Béatrice, 1992
  - The First Century After Beatrice (translated by Dorothy S. Blair, 1993)
• Le Rocher de Tanios, 1993
  - The Rock of Tanios (translated by Dorothy S. Blair, 1994)
• Les Échelles du Levant, 1996
  - Ports of Call (translated by Alberto Manguel, 1998)
• Les Identités meurtrières, 1998
  - On Identity (UK title: translated from the French by Barbara Bray, 2000) / In the Name of Identity (US title: translated by Barbara Bray, 2001)
• L'Amour de loin, 2000 (opera libretto, music by Kaija Saariaho) = L’amour de loin: opera in five acts
  - Kaukainen rakkaus (suom. Jukka Havu, 2004)
• Le Périple de Baldassare, 2000
  - Balthasar's Odyssey (translated by Barbara Bray, 2002)
• Adriana Mater, 2004 (opera libretto, music by Kaija Saariaho)
• Quatre instants, for soprano & piano, 2004 (music by Kaija Saariaho)
• Origines, 2004
  - Origins: a Memoir (translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, 2008)
• Le dérèglement du monde, 2009
  - Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-First Century (translated from the French by George Miller, 2011)
  
• Émilie, 2010 (opera libretto, music by Kaija Saariaho)
• Les désorientés, 2012
  - The Disoriented (translated by Frank Wynne, 2021)
  
• Discours de réception d'Amin Maalouf à l'Académie française et réponse de Jean-Christophe Rufin, 2014 (with Jean-Christophe Rufin)
  
• Un fauteuil sur la Seine: quatre siècles d'histoire de France, 2016
  
• Le naufrage des civilizations, 2019
  - Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way (translated by Frank Wynne, 2020)
  - Sivilisaatioiden haaksirikko (suomentanut Tapani Kilpeläinen, 2021)
  
• Nos frères inattendus: roman, 2020