Abbas Baydoun

Abbas Baydoun is a Lebanese author, teacher and journalist born in Tyre in 1945. He studied Arabic Literature, obtaining a Masters from the Sorbonne and, as a political activist, was jailed in 1968 and 1982 following the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. He has since given up political activity. He was the cultural editor of Al-Safir newspaper and has published 18 volumes of poetry. His work has been translated into English, French, German and various other languages. Since the 1990s, he has focused on prose and fiction writing, publishing novels including Autumn of Innocence (2015), which won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2017, while the English edition of Blood Test (2002) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award.