Amin Maalouf - Disordered World

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Amin Maalouf was born in Lebanon in 1949. A journalist and director of the daily newspaper An-Nahar , he lived in Beirut until the start of the civil war in 1975, when he left for Paris with his family. His life straddles East and West — he reads and writes in Arabic, but chooses to publish in French. He refuses to be limited to one identity, either Arab or French, but chooses to be both simultaneously. A novelist, essayist and memoirist, he has won prestigious prizes, including the 1993 Prix Goncourt and the 2010 Asturias Prize, and was nominated for the 2011 International Man Booker. His novels include Leo Africanus , The Rock of Tanios , Samarkand and Balthasar’s Odyssey , which together with The Crusades through Arab Eyes , On Identity and Origins: A Memoir have been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Paris.

George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique ’s English-language edition, and the translator of Conversations with My Gardener by Henri Cueco and Inside Al-Qaeda by Mohammed Sifaoui.

Leo Africanus

Samarkand

The First Century after Beatrice

The Rock of Tanios

The Gardens of Light

Ports of Call

Balthasar’s Odyssey

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

On Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

Origins: A Memoir

First published in Great Britain 2011

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 2009

English translation copyright © George Miller 2011

‘The Orchestra’ by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright © 1948, 1962 by William Carlos Williams.

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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