Nadia Tueni

Nadia Hamadeh Tueni was born in Baakleen into an intellectual Druze-French family; her father was a prominent diplomat and her husband Ghassan Tueni was publisher of the crusading newspaper An-Nahar. Writing in French with deep Eastern poetic sensibility, she published her first volume of poetry, Les Textes blonds, in 1963 following the tragic death of her young daughter Nayla.

Tueni won the Prix de l'Académie Française in 1973 for her collection Poèmes pour une histoire. Her 1979 masterpiece, Vingt poèmes pour un amour (Twenty Poems for One Love), captured the agonizing beauty, historical layeredness, and tragic unraveling of her beloved war-torn Lebanon with incandescent lyricism before her premature death from cancer at forty-seven.