Fiction

1982, Unsi yalhu ma’a rita: kitab al-baligin [“Unsi is Playing with Rita: A Book for Adults”], al-Mu’assasa l-Jami’iyya li-l-dirasat wa-l-nasr, Beirut.

1983, Al-Mustabidd [“The Tyrant”], Dar ab’ad, Beirut. Reprint Riad El-Rayyes Books 2001

1986, Fusha mustahdafa bayna l-nu’as wa-l-nawm, Mukhtarat, Beirut. Reprint Riad El-Rayyes Books 2001.

Translated into French by Luc Barbulesco and Philippe Cardinal under the title Passage au Crépuscule, Actes Sud, 1992. Also translated into English by Nirvana Tannuki under the title Passage to Dusk, Austin: Texas University Press, 2001. To be (...)

Place and Date of Birth: Lebanon, 1945 Nationality: Lebanese

Education Doctorat in Lettres Modernes, Paris III, 1974 D.E.A. in Linguistics, Paris V , 1978

Teaching Experience Teacher of Arabic Language for Foreigners, Université de Paris III, 1972-1974 Professor of Arabic, Lebanese University, 1974- Present Visiting Professor, Université de Toulouse, April-May 1999

Publications Various publications in Arabic on rhetoric, linguistics and literature

Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov 2005

By Youssef Rakha

Novelist, humorist, linguist, professor: Rashid Al-Daif is, in more ways than most critics are willing to recognise, the Arab world’s answer to Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco. That he is little translated and seldom discussed from a philosophical standpoint is rather an unfortunate contingency, partly explained by the fact that, following his effective secession from the Lebanese Communist Party in 1979, he has purposely upheld the notion of literature as, before all else, a sublime but accessible form of entertainment, gradually nurturing a (...)

From the book, Lebanon, Lebanon, Publisher: Saqi Books (20 Sep 2006)

Once upon a time, about fifty years ago, I worked as an au pair girl for three months with a French Protestant Marxist family. The parents were intellectuals and teachers of English, and their children were numerous and most of the time delightful. I learned a great deal from that family. I learned some French, which was the ostensible purpose of my visit, but I also leaned about French cooking and French communism. It was a period of hard work, both physical and mental, and I benefited from it greatly.

One of the most (...)