Etel Adnan, an influential Lebanese American writer who wrote a seminal novel about the Lebanese civil war and achieved acclaim in her later years as a visual artist, died Sunday in Paris. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed by her longtime partner and only immediate survivor, Simone Fattal, who did not specify the cause.
For much of her life, Adnan, who grew up in Lebanon and spent several decades in California, was an international literary figure, her lyrical prose reverberating with generations of Middle Eastern writers.
Her most widely acclaimed novel, “Sitt Marie Rose” (1978), based on a true story, centers on a kidnapping during Lebanon’s civil war and is told from the perspective of the civilians enduring brutal political conflict. It has become a classic of war literature, translated into 10 languages and taught in American classrooms.
Adnan also wrote numerous collections of poetry. Her latest, “Shifting the Silence,” was published in October 2020. Reviewing her previous collection, “Night,” for The New York Times Book Review, Benjamin Hollander described it as “a meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’ and the verses of Sufi mysticism,” and “an intricate thread of reflections on pain and beauty.”
In her poetry, novels and nonfiction, Adnan often wrote about political discord and violence. Her books on the Middle East — such as “The Arab Apocalypse,” a poetry collection from 1980; “Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz),” from 1993; and “In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country” (2005) — address the region from sociological, philosophical and historical perspectives.
Adnan caught the attention of the international art world in her late 1980s, when her paintings were included in Documenta 13, the contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. The invitation to the show resulted from a serendipitous visit by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Documenta 13’s director, to Lebanon, where she saw an exhibit of Adnan’s geometric and vibrantly colored abstract work on generally small canvases.
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