About Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan (25 February 1925 - 14 November 2021) is a poet, novelist, painter, and essayist. Born to a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a predominantly Arabic-speaking society. Her father, much older than her mother, had been a member of the Turkish General Staff of the Ottoman Empire. She spent her childhood in Beirut where she was educated in a French convent school, and thus French became the language in which she wrote her first literary works. She studied English from a young age, and most of her later writings were written primarily in that language.At the age of 24, Adnan traveled to Paris, where she completed her philosophy studies at the Sorbonne. Sometime later, she left for the United States where she continued her graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. She taught the philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael from 1958 to 1972, and lectured at several universities in the United States. After returning to France, Etel Adnan lived in Paris and Erquy. Since the 1980s, she had lived with the artist Simone Fattal (1942).
In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” Etel Adnan is the author of numerous poetic works, including Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry and Time (2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She also published essays, and novels, and edited the cultural pages of the French-language Lebanese daily newspaper "As-Safa."
At over 80 years old, she began exhibiting her artworks in prestigious institutions: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Mudam in Luxembourg, the Paul Klee Center in Bern, the Luma Foundation in Arles, and documenta 13 in Kassel.
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