Charif MAJDALANI

Professor

+961 (1) 421 000 ext 5311 charif.majdalani@usj.edu.lb

Charif Majdalani was born in 1960 in Beirut. After graduating from the Lycée franco-libanais in Beirut, he completed his higher education at the University of Provence, where he defended a doctoral thesis on Antonin Artaud in 1993. Back in Lebanon the same year, he was a professor at the University of Balamand and then at the Université Saint-Joseph, where he headed the French Literature department from 1999 to 2008. Between 1995 and 1998, he was in charge of the literary column of the monthly L’Orient-Express, directed by Samir Kassir. He is currently a member of the editorial board of L’Orient littéraire, president of the Maison Internationale des Ecrivains in Beirut and a columnist for the French daily newspaper La Croix. A French-speaking Lebanese writer, Charif Majdalani is also the author of eight novels, including Histoire de la Grande Maison (2005), Caravansérail (2007 - Tropiques Prize and François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française), Villa des femmes (2015 - Jean Giono Prize), l’Empereur à pied (2017) and Dernière Oasis (2021). Beirut 2020, journal d’un effondrement, which he wrote during the Lebanese crisis, won the special prize from the jury of the Femina Prize in 2020. A collection of twenty life stories, Mille origines, his latest work, was published in 2023.