Abbas Beydoun is a Lebanese poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. He has published 21 poetry collections and 7 novels. He was awarded the Mediterranean prize for poetry and the 2017 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his novel Autumn of Innocence.
He was born in 1945, in southern Lebanon and grew up in Tyr, on the southern coast. His father was a writer who was interested in Islamic history. Beydoun studied Arabic Literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut, and later completed a Masters degree in literature at the Sorbonne in Paris.
He was politically active in left-wing parties and was imprisoned and tortured twice; in 1968 by the Lebanese security forces, and in 1982 by the Israeli forces during their occupation of Lebanon. Beydoun first taught Arabic literature, then worked as a journalist. He was editor of the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily, As Safir for 20 years. Since the newspaper closed, Beydoun has been writing for other Arab media and currently has a weekly column in the cultural pages of Al Jadid. He has published many volumes of poetry, some of which have been translated into French, Italian, German, and English. His novel Tahlil damm (2002) was translated by Max Weiss and published as Blood Test (Syracuse University Press, 2008), winning the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award.
