Rachid al-DaifProblèmes

Rashid al-Daif was born in 1942 in Zhgarta, a Maronite stronghold in northern Lebanon. He received his PhD in literature after studying in France. He was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party but left it in 1979. He lived in West Beirut during the civil war, oftentimes under a false identity in order to protect himself from sectarian violence. Passage to Dusk, al-Daif’s second novel, was published in 1986. He is the author of three volumes of poetry and several novels, including Dear Mr. Kawabata (1995), This Side of Innocence (1997), and Learning English (1998), which have been translated into English.