(1935-1983)

Born in the town of Baaqline in Lebanon on July 8 1935, writer Nadia Tueni grew up in a multi-cultural family. The daughter to a Druze diplomat and writer and a French mother, Nadia attended convent school in Beirut until the age of fifteen, when the family moved to Athens, where her father was the ambassador. Nadia was enrolled in the Institut Français. She later returned to Beirut to study law at St. Joseph University. During her studies, she met and married Ghassan Tuéni, a young journalist. The couple moved to Paris and later lived with their family of three children in both Washington, D.C. and New York city, where Ghassan was Lebanon’s representative to the United Nations from 1977-1982. Nadia authored ten collections of poetry as well as a collection of articles, conference papers, and short stories published in 1986 in La Prose Oeuvres Completes. In 1967, Nadia became literary editor of Le Jour. That same year she was awarded the Ordre de la Pléiade, the order of Francophonie and Cultural Dialogue and at her funeral in Beirut in 1983, Nadia received the gold medal of honor for public instruction.