Alain Tasso (born July 22, 1962 in Beirut) is a Lebanese-French poet, painter and essayist. An autodidact, his prolific intense literary work is largely acclaimed by critics. Biography Tasso attended high school at the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais de Beyrouth, but refused to sit for his baccalaureate exam, and decided to study accounting instead. He remained in that field only for a few years. Grandly interested in antiquities, art objects, classical music, especially sacred baroque music, Tasso, who had started playing the piano at five, opened in 1987 "L'insolite", an art gallery. He specialized in both Art Nouveau and Oriental art, and began drawing miniatures and calligraphy. Two years later, as the violent conflicts of the Lebanese civil war ravaged the country, he was forced to shut down gallery. He worked between 1992 and 2000 as a freelancer for numerous French and Arabic magazines and daily papers in Beirut, such as L'Orient Le Jour, and published in 1993 a youth poem collection featuring a preface written by the Lebanese poet Said Akl. In 1996, Tasso was promoted Chevalier de l'Ordre Patriarcal de la Sainte Croix de Jérusalem, an eminent Oriental Catholic distinction. In 1998, he participated in a collective exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as of following year, started teaching the postgraduate "Æsthetics" course at the Institut d'études scéniques, audiovisuelles et cinématographiques (IESAV - The Scenic, Audiovisual and Cinematographic Institute) of the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Later on, he was asked to lecture in several departments of the Faculty of Humanities at the same university (intercultural competence, art history, fine arts, cultural communication. Since 1995, he participated in numerous painting exhibitions, and his art evolved from an abstract Arabic calligraphy to a Sufi style, all the way to a dense and monochromatic black vision. In 2001, Tasso founded along with the Lebanese critic Joseph Tarrab "Péristyles", an artistic and literary publishing outlet at the Saint Joseph University. In 2003, a study on the "Neige écarlate" ranked him with poets Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan. Bonnefoy wrote him after reading one of his publications: "Thank you for this beautiful book. Your Intailles makes us think…". In 2005 he was promoted to Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and featured in 2008 in the anthology Poésies de langue française published by Seghers Editions. Alain Tasso is the author of more