Rabih Alameddine

Alameddine was born in Amman, Jordan, to a Lebanese Druze family, and grew up amid Lebanon's civil war, England, and Kuwait before training as an engineer at UCLA and later working as a painter; he did not turn seriously to fiction until his late thirties.

His early novels, including Koolaids: The Art of War and I, the Divine (the latter narrated entirely as a hundred failed first chapters), established a restless, formally inventive voice returning again and again to Lebanese exile, war, and storytelling's own unreliability; The Hakawati (2008) wove a Beirut family's history through nested tales modeled on the Arabian Nights, and An Unnecessary Woman (2014), narrated by an aging Beirut translator, became a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and one of his most celebrated books.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) continued his lifelong fascination with unreliable narration and family myth-making, and won the National Book Award in 2025. Alameddine divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.