Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese-American novelist and painter. Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1959, he grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon and studied engineering at UCLA and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, before turning to literature. He is one of the most important and distinctive voices in contemporary Arab American fiction. Alameddine's novels include Koolaids (1998), I, the Divine (2001), The Hakawati (2008), An Unnecessary Woman (2014)—which won the Arab-American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award—and The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021). The Wrong End of the Telescope follows a Lebanese American doctor who travels to a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, during the European refugee crisis. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2022 and was praised for its intelligence, its dark comedy, and its deeply humane portrait of displacement and resilience. Alameddine divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut. His work is celebrated for its experimental form, its cosmopolitan sensibility, its dark wit, and its engagement with Arab and diasporic experience.