The Mosaic Rooms

The Mosaic Rooms is holding a major tribute to the great Syrian poet Adonis, which will include a week-long series of literary events and an exhibition of his stunning etchings and drawings.

Adonis is today considered one of the most important figures in the Arabic literary history of the last fifty years, and the Arab world’s greatest living poet. His work has spanned poetry, literary criticism and history, Sufism, politics and contemporary cultural affairs. In the early sixties he published one of the most avant-garde literary magazine in the Arab World, Zawaya; in his ground breaking study of the relationship between Arabic poetry, Islamic exegesis and the Qur’an, the three volume critical study Athabet wal Mutahawwil (The Permanent and the Evolving), he revolutionized our understanding of that difficult dynamic while publishing – and interpreting for a modern audience – one of the finest anthologies of classical Arabic poetry ever compiled.

Exiled to France after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he worked to bring to Arabic poetry the international recognition it deserved, while defending its universal importance as a language of secular expression against increasing subordination to religious or nationalist discourse or, worse, its marginalization. A rebellious but critical voice always, Adonis also refused to adapt himself to orthodoxy or critical conformity, struggling for many years to survive exile in poverty. Yet even today, when he is more than eighty years old, he retains his fresh and critical outlook on the events of his homeland, attracting controversy and debate because of his cautionary and critical words on the so-called Arab Spring.

In 2011, Adonis was awarded the highly prestigious Goethe Prize.

More details of the Mosaic Rooms’ Adonis season will be published soon.