Lebanese American poet, novelist, and artist Etel Adnan, known for books including Sitt Marie Rose, Sea and Fog, and Night, has died at 96, the New York Times reports.

Adnan was born in Beirut and educated in France and the United States. She first gained literary fame in 1978 with the novel Sitt Marie Rose, about a woman kidnapped during the Lebanese Civil War. The book won the Amitié Franco-Arab Prize and is still studied today.

Adnan wrote several other books across various genres, including poetry and nonfiction. A critic for Kirkus praised her 2009 short story collection, Master of the Eclipse, writing that Adnan “discerns whole worlds in little slices of life.”

 

She was also renowned as a visual artist, with her paintings displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Adnan’s admirer’s paid tribute to her on social media. On Twitter, author Zeyn Joukhadar wrote, “Farewell Etel Adnan. You were a lighthouse for so many of us, especially young queer Arab artists. When you said ‘I am making the mountain as people make a painting,’ I understood something about the making of myself.”

And anthropologist Maya Mikdashi tweeted, “I am going to look at the sea today and become who I am. I will live this emptiness, this fullness that Etel Adnan leaves. A world made by writers, artists, thinkers—a life of making worlds.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.