Etel Adnan, who passed away in November 2021, was known to be one of the world’s most famous Arab-American poets and visual artists.
Google’s Doodle on Monday celebrated the late revolutionary Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan.
The Doodle portrayed Adnan sitting in what seems to be her gallery and surrounded by her paintings, with a Lebanese flag in the corner behind her.
Born in Beirut in 1925, when Lebanon was under the French mandate, Adnan became one of the Arab world’s leading artists and writers, quickly gaining international recognition.
Adnan’s most famous literary work is her 1977 novel Sitt Marie Rose, set before and during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, which earned the Franco-Arabic Friendship Award and has been translated into more than 10 languages.
In 2010, she was awarded the Arab American Book Awards for her story collection Master of the Eclipse.
Although she started painting in the late 1950s, her work only started to capture international attention in her 80s.
The late writer was born to a Syrian father who was a former officer of the Ottoman Empire, and a Greek mother. She was educated in French-language schools in Beirut before studying philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
She lived in California for many years during and after Lebanon’s Civil War and spent most of her late years in France. She passed away in Paris in November 2021 at the age of 96.
The content of this report relied on a 2021 obituary of Etel Adnan written by Farah Abdessamad for The New Arab.
