Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Lebanese poet and novelist, long-time Paris resident Vénus Khoury-Ghata is the author of twenty-three novels, including Une Maison aux bord des larmes (translated by Marilyn Hacker as A House at the Edge of Tears, Graywolf Press, 2005 ) and La Femme qui ne savait pas garder les hommes, Les Derniers Jours de Mandelstam, an imaginative biography, and twenty-one collections of poems, including Eloignez-vous de ma fenêtre (Mercure de France, 2021) and Gens de l’eau (Mercure de France, 2018), from which the poems the PTC translated were taken. Other collections of her poems available in English in Marilyn Hacker’s translation, include Alphabets of Sand (Carcanet Press, 2008) and Where are the trees going? (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Recipient of the Académie Française prize in poetry in 2009, she was named an Officer of the Légion d’honneur the following year. She received the Prix Goncourt de poésie in 2011.