Hanane Aad

Hanane Aad is a Lebanese poet, journalist (Print media, radio and TV), literary critic and translator. She has lived in Vienna, Austria, since 2009.

She has published a number of books: Banquet of Mercy for the Univers (English) May 2022 (Mumbai, India); Duet of Flowers (Japanese and English), with the Japanese poet Mariko Sumikura, 2016;  in addition to 5 books published in Arabic in Beirut, Lebanon: I Carry my Freedom in my Mouth, 2010; Pearls of the Soul Riding Virtue, 2005; Like a Grain of Wheat, 1998; The Echo of Nostalgia, 1992; Dialogue of Cultures and Love of the Language, 2001.  

She won the Award for Excellence in Poetry at Tudor Arghezi Literature Festival 2014 in Targu Jiu in Gorj, Romania, and she received the Award for Excellence in Foreign Poetry at the Poesis Festival of Satu Mare, Romania, in 2011.

In 2005, she started to read her poetry regularly at international poetry events and festivals in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Among the worldwide festivals that she has participated in are: Struga Poetry Nights, Macedonia, 2010; Printemps des poètes, Bucharest 2011; Palabra en El Mondo, Venice, 2012 and 2013; Granada International Poetry Festival, Nicaragua, 2015; Luna De Locos International Poetry Festival, Pereira, Colombia, 2015. Her poetry has been published in many anthologies and magazines in different countries and languages, including German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Estonian, Turkish, Hindi, Bosnian, Bulgarian and Portuguese.

At the Lebanese daily newspaper An-Nahar, where she worked between 1995 and 2005, as a literary critic and writer, her name is associated with a long series of interviews (1999-2005) with French-speaking authors like Michel Deguy, André Makine, Andrée Chedid, René de Obaldia, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Olivier Roy, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Paule Constant, Bruno Etienne, Bruno Chenu, Jean Lacouture and others.

On the occasion of the francophone summit which took place in Lebanon in 2002, she published Dialogue of Cultures and Love of the Language. This book collected 22 of the above-mentioned literary dialogues.

As a translator she translated from French into Arabic the 450-page historical novel about Beirut, entitled The Novel of Beirut by Alexandre Najjar, as well as the novel l’Imposture des mots by Yasmina Khadra.

Hanane Aad was awarded the Prize of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture in 2000 and won the International Award for Excellence in Journalism of the International Catholic Union of the Press in 2001 in Genf.

(Adapted from Lyrik LIne)