Amin Maalouf – Winner of French Premiere Literary Award
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Amin Maalouf, a winner of French Premiere literary award, the Prix Goncourt is a prolific writer who disputed against the Discrimination of people based on identities. He too has the intricacy and wonder of belonging to different places. He fights against this sort of discrimination throughout his works. He disclosed the roots of a problem between the two worlds- the Arab and the western that has never been settled. Would someone become a super human just because of belonging to a particular place?.
I personally believe that a person be estimated by his behavior and not by his identity.
Born in Beirut on 1949, He was the second of four children of Odette and Ruchdi. His father ,a journalist and a poet, owned a newspaper that wrote essays on parliamentary elections. All his family members were fundamentally writers. His ancestor translated Moliere into Arabic. He was not much influenced by Arabic literature. He was very much inspired by the western literature. In his Childhood, he read Books such as Dickens, Dumas and Gullivers Travels in the Arabic translation. This introduced him to the broad world of the western literature. His mother being a catholic sent him to a French Jesuit School. Religion had a play even in his education. He studied sociology at French University in Beirut.
He worked as a Journalist in Lebanon until the civil war in 1975. Following the civil war in Lebanon in 1975 he had to move to Paris. As a youth, the idea of moving away from his beloved Homeland was revolting for him. He finds it difficult when people look at him dubiously wanting to know where he really belonged to. His sense of pain made him to write great works such as deadly identities.
Amins Mother and father too had complex religious identities. His grandfather was a Rationalist and refused to baptize his children. Amin Maalouf is dubious of all religion. He believes that it was the misuse of religion that led his country to catastrophic consequences. His dads family members were too caught between Protestantism, Catholicism and anti-clericalism. This afflicted relationship with religion and some members of his fathers family swayed towards a very extreme altitude.
He believed that a person must not judged by what he believes but by what they do.
At the age of 22 Amin Maalouf joined Lebanons leading Arab daily and started travelling different places. His early journalism was in Arabic and later after his migration he started writing books in French. His experiences of civil war and migration, the feeling of being in between different cultures is the salient features of his novels. His Fiction irradiates history mutual to both the middle east and the west. Amin Maalouf shows interest in both French and Lebanese cultures. He writes on views that were not written by