Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese-American novelist and painter, born in Amman in 1959 to Lebanese Druze parents and raised in Kuwait and Lebanon. ¹ Trained as an engineer, he is the author of Koolaids, The Hakawati, An Unnecessary Woman and The Angel of History; The Wrong End of the Telescope won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2025. ¹

Alameddine was born in Amman, Jordan, to Lebanese Druze parents, and grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon, which he left at seventeen to live first in England and then in California. ¹ He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master's degree in business in San Francisco, and began his career as an engineer before turning to writing and painting. ¹ He has lived in San Francisco and Beirut, and in 2018 he was teaching in the creative writing programme of the University of Virginia. ¹

Alameddine has stated his own position on religion in his own words. In a conversation published by the Mississippi Review in the spring of 2002 he identified as an atheist. ² In 2017 he told The Rumpus: "I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating." ³ On those two statements, fifteen years apart, the museum records his faith as atheist-or-sceptic, self-identified; his parents' Druze faith is his family background and is not the basis of the record. ¹

His debut novel Koolaids (1998) moves between the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese Civil War; it was followed by the story collection The Perv (1999) and I, the Divine (2001). ¹ The Hakawati (2008) retells the tales of a traditional Arab storyteller across generations of a Lebanese family. ¹ An Unnecessary Woman (2014), the portrait of an elderly Beirut translator, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the California Book Award gold medal for fiction. ¹ The Angel of History (2016) won the Arab American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. ¹ His novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2025. ¹ He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. ¹

• The source entities cited above, registered under data/source/.