Ali Ahmad Said
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Ali Ahmad Said (born 1930), also known by the pseudonym Adonis, is a Syrian-born poet and literary critic who has made his career largely in Lebanon and France.
Said was born in Qassabin, in Northern Syria. From an early age, he worked in the fields, but his father regularly had him memorize poetry, and he began to compose poems of his own. In 1947 he had the opportunity to recite a poem for Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli; that led to a series of scholarships, first to a school in Latakia and then to the Syrian University in Damascus, from which he graduated in 1954.
In 1955 he was imprisoned for six months for being a member of the Syrian National Party, a quasi-fascist party that advocated Syrian dominance over a wide swath of the Middle East. Following his release from prison in 1956, he settled in Beirut, Lebanon, where in 1957 he and Syro-Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal founded the magazine Shi'r ("Poetry"). At this time, he abandoned Syrian nationalism in favor of pan-Arabism; he also became a less political writer.
In 1980 he fled to Paris to escape the Lebanese Civil War.
References
- Irwin, Robert "An Arab Surrealist". The Nation, January 3, 2005, 23–24, 37–38.