Sun on the Tongue

Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, Etel Adnan has received many awards for her more than fifteen books: France Pays-Arab Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, Arab American Book Award, California Book Award for Poetry, Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Radius of Arab American Writers. The Etel Adnan Award for Women Playwrights was established by the Al-Medina Theatre of Beirut to support women writers in the Arab World. She was honored with France’s L’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts in 2014. Adnan’s paintings, drawings, fold-out books, ceramics, and tapestries are exhibited on several continents, with recent solo shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha); dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Etel Adnan is represented by Galerie Lelong, Paris and New York. She lives in Paris.

"Etel Adnan is a polymath. Her work crosses many dimensions: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, tapestries, teaching, and her most recent works, her sculptures. Adnan is one of the greatest artists of our time, and an inspiration to so many other artists."