Elias Khoury (; born 12 July 1948) is a Lebanese novelist and public intellectual. His novels and literary criticism have been translated into several languages. In 2000, he won the Prize of Palestine for his book Gate of the Sun, and he won the Al Owais Award for fiction writing in 2007. Khoury has also written three plays and two screenplays. From 1993 to 2009, Khoury served as an editor of Al-Mulhaq, the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Nahar. He also taught at universities in Middle Eastern and European countries, and the United States. Biography Early life Elias Khoury was born in 1948 into a middle-class Greek Orthodox family in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyye district of Beirut. He began reading Lebanese novelist Jurji Zaydan's works at the age of eight, which he later said taught him more about Islam and his Arabic background. Later, Khoury grew interested in classical Arabic literature, Russian novels by Pushkin and Chekhov, and modernist literature. In 1966, he earned his high school diploma from al-Ra'i al-Saleh High School in Beirut. At the time he graduated, Lebanese intellectual life was becoming more polarized, with opposition groups adopting pro-Palestinian, radical Arab nationalist stances. The following year, in 1967, a 19-year-old Khoury traveled to Jordan, where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and enlisted in Fatah, the argest resistance organization in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled in the wake of an attempted coup against King Hussein, in Black September. Khoury studied history at the Lebanese University and graduated in 1971. In 1972, he received his PhD in social history at the University of Paris. Involvement in the Lebanese civil war At the start of the Lebanese civil war, Khoury became a member of the Lebanese National Movement, an alliance of leftist, pan-Arab parties with mostly Muslim supporters. He was injured during the war, and temporarily blinded. Career Literary career Khoury published his first novel in 1975, On the Relations of the Circle (Arabic: عن علاقات الدائرة). It was followed in 1977 by The Little Mountain (Arabic: الجبل الصغير), set during the Lebanese Civil War, a conflict that Khoury initially thought would be a catalyst for progressive change. Other works include The Journey of Little Gandhi, about a rural immigrant to Beirut who lives through the events of the civil war; and Gate of the Sun