Lebanese journalist and novelist, whose native language was Arabic but who writes in French. Most of Maalouf's books have a historical setting. In 1993 he received the Prix de Goncourt for his novel Le rocher de tanios (The Rock of Tanios). His books are written with the skills of a master storyteller. They offer a refined and sensitive view of the values and attitudes of different cultures in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean world.

"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." (from The First Century After Beatrice, 1992)

Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut, Lebanon, as a Catholic Arab. His father, Ruchdi Maalouf, was a writer, teacher, and journalist. He attended Jesuit schools in Beirut and after studying sociology and economics, Maalouf continued the long family tradition and become a journalist. He worked 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 my Muslim and PLO strength, Christian militias attacked Muslims, which lead to civil war. The horrors of war entered Maalouf's own home land and in 1977 and he emigrated with his wife and three children to Paris, where they have lived ever since. Maalouf continued to work as a journalist, writing for Jeune Afrique and An-nahar Arabe et International. Maalouf's first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, appeared in 1983. Although Western research have scrutinized the religious zeals, and political and economic maneuvers behind the Crusade Wars (1096 - 1291), Maalouf's book, in which he used Arab accounts, brought to the clash of Eastern and Western cultures a fresh and lesser examined perspective.

After moving to France Maalouf has travelled little. In 1994 he visited Lebanon - the first time since settling France. Maalouf spends part of the year on one of the Channel Islands where he writes his novels in a little fisherman's house. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Maalouf's characters find themselves often in conflict with the beliefs of their surroundings and time, like 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. 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."

Maalouf' acclaimed story-within-a-story, The Rock of Tanios, was set in the 19th century Lebanon. The central characters are Sheikh Francis, a Christian Arab, and the sheikh's illegitimate offspring, Tanios. Through their fates and legends Maalouf creates a historical romance filled with local myths, worldwide political games, treachery, and love. The title of the book refers to a peculiar rock formation, looking like a great stone chair, that dominates the Lebanese village of Kfaryabda.

In Samarkand (1989) Maalouf spins fact and fiction around the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, created in Samarkand in 1072 A.D. The manuscript is claimed to have vanished on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Maalouf gives the reader an exotic and vivid picture of the 11th-century Persia, with assassins and intrigues, and returns to it 900 years later through the eyes of an American academic searching for the manuscript.

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 several themes - the antagonist between the rich, technologically advanced Western countries and the poor South, corrupt science, sexual discrimination. "And the journalists? 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." (from The First Century after Beatrice) Ports Of Call (1999) was a bittersweet love story which dealt with the troubled history of the modern Middle East. The protagonist, 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 apart families.

Selected works:

-  Les Croisades Vues Par Les Arabes, 1983 - The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
-  Léon L’Africain, 1986 - Leo the African
-  Samarcande, 1988 - Samarkand
-  Les Jardins de Lumière, 1991 - The Gardens of Light
-  Le Premier Siècle Après Béatrice, 1992 - The First Century After Beatrice
-  Le Rocher de Tanios, 1993 - The Rock of Tanios
-  Les Echelles du Levant, 1996
-  Les Identités Meurtrières, 1998
-  Ports of Call, 1999
-  L'amour de Loin, 2000 (opera libretto)
-  On Identity, 2000