Native name ﻋﺒﺎﺲ اﻟﺰﻳﻦ Name Abbas El-Zein Nationality Australian/Lebanese | Language English Occupation Writer and Academic | |
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Education American University of Beirut (BE), University of Southampton (MSc, PhD), Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees (DEA) Notable awards New South Wales Premier Literary Award - Community Relations Commission Award | ||
Abbas El-Zein (Arabic: ﻋﺒﺎﺲ اﻟﺰﻳﻦ ; born 1963) is an Australian-Lebanese writer and academic. He is the author of two acclaimed works of fiction – a novel, Tell the Running Water and a collection of short stories, The Secret Maker of the World – as well as an award-winning memoir, Leave to Remain, about growing up in civil-war Lebanon and migrating to Europe and Australia. He has published essays and articles on war, displacement and environmental decline. His work has appeared in the New York Times the Guardian the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as literary magazines Meanjin, Heat and Overland. His work is a manifestation of a growing number of Anglo-Arab and Franco-Arab writers, emerging in the 2000s, especially authors from a Lebanese background writing in English or French, post Lebanese civil war, such as Rabih Alameddine, Nada Awar Jarrar, Wajdi Mouawad and Rawi Hage, in whose work themes of violence, loss, memory and identity are prominent. He has made numerous media appearances. As a scholar, he has authored and co-authored a number of scientific papers on environmental sustainability, climate change, development and poverty. His more recent work has focused on the environmental, economic and human cost of high levels of militarisation in the Arab world. He has lectured at the American University of Beirut and the University of New South Wales. He is professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sydney.
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Background
Abbas El-Zein was born and grew up in Beirut. He was twelve years of age when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. He was educated at the bilingual French-Arabic school, Mission Laique Francaise. After graduating with a degree in civil engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1986, he left for the UK where he acquired Master's and PhD degrees in computational mechanics and mathematical modelling from the University of Southampton, and later, a Master's by research degree in environmental science from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. He lived and worked in the UK and France for a number of years before moving to Australia in 1995. He started writing his first novel while living in the UK. In 1993, he participated in a writing workshop/retreat run by Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens at the Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre, Wales. Later, he published a number of essays in Meanjin and Heat and completed his first novel in 1998. In 2005, he won an Australia Council for the Arts grant for new work, which led to the writing of his memoir Leave to Remain in 2009.