Middle East 4 ChangeTruth is always revolutionary
Jurgen Balzan,
Malta Today.
Lebanese writer Elias Khoury is one of the leading lights of Arab literature and he says that the Israeli occupation is classical colonialism built upon a rational and cynical project of ethnic cleansing.
Celebrated Lebanese writer Elias Khoury is in Malta to participate in the annual Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival organised by Inizjamed. I meet the 68-year-old writer and intellectual in his hotel in Valletta and I am immediately struck by his soft-spoken lucidity and profound humanity.
Khoury came to prominence as a novelist, commentator, editor and academic with unwavering political commitment in the tormented 1970s where he was a direct witness of the brutal civil war in Lebanon.
But he says that literature cannot change the world, it only changes literature.