Arab poet, translator, editor, and theorist Ali Ahmad Said Asbar was the eldest of six children born to a family of farmers in Syria’s Al-Qassabain village. Though they could not afford the cost of formal education, Adonis’s father taught his son to read and helped him memorize poems while he worked on the family farm. At fourteen, Adonis recited a poem to the president of Syria during his visit a neighboring town, after which the president offered to grant the boy’s request to attend school. With the president’s support, Adonis enrolled in a French high school and then in the Damascus University, where he earned a BA in philosophy.
In his late teens, he began writing under the name Adonis, after the Greek god of fertility. After a year in prison as a result of his political activity, Adonis moved to Beirut, where he found a rich community of expatriate writers and artists. There he cofounded and edited two progressive literary journals, “Sh’ir” and “Mawaqif”, and earned a PhD at St. Joseph University.
Adonis has won the first ever International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award; the Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression’s Bjørnson Prize; the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels and the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award. In 1983 he was elected into the Stéphané Mallarmé Academy.
Adonis has taught at the Sorbonne; Damascus University and the Lebanese University. He now lives in Paris.
