
© Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons
Amin Maalouf
The novelist Amin Maalouf was born in Lebanon but fled to Paris in 1976 to escape the country’s civil war. His novel The Rock of Tanios, set in nineteenth-century Lebanon, received the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Emigration, he said in 2014, is “a Lebanese tradition.”