Etel Adnan

Isabella Hammad’s article, Reading During a Genocide: What Etel Adnan’s Novel Taught Me was published in the March 11, 2025 issue of the Yale Review.

“Etel Adnan may have lived a life that covered multiple geographies and languages—born in Beirut to Greek and Syrian parents, she spent much of her adulthood in Paris and California—but she retained a visceral and moral connection to the Arab world. Known primarily for her paintings and poetry, she is a writer who can write into the darkness, who sometimes feels like a friend, and who always meets your eye. My student’s comment that ‘she said what needed to be said’ was, I think, a response to the gentle clarity of Adnan’s writing, to her simultaneously cosmic and close vision.”

Read more here.