A vast world in ten minutes • Alexandre Najjar

The author of over thirty novels, stories, essays, poems, and biographies, Alexandre Najjar, also a trained lawyer, is one of the leading lights of francophone Lebanese literature. His contribution to the superb L’Orient littéraire, the monthly literary supplement of Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour, means that Beirut remains one of the cities in the Arab world where literature is considered a staple, despite the country’s tough economic reality. In 2020, he published three novels: Les confessions de Beethoven, L’amour ne se commande pas (a story about Samuel Beckett), and The Devil’s Crown.