“I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.”

Lebanese painter and writer

Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese painter and writer known for his novels and essays. His work has received major recognition, including the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. He is best known as a novelist, with The Wrong End of the Telescope winning the PEN/Faulkner Award and The True True Story of Raja the Gullible taking the National Book Award. As a writer and painter, he is associated with literary work that has earned broad critical attention.