The celebrated Arabic poet Adonis at the Onassis Stegi

He is one of the Arab World’s greatest poets, and he is coming to the Onassis Stegi for a conversation with Yorgos Archimandritis. The winner of a Goethe Prize, one of the world’s most significant cultural awards (previous winners include Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Pina Bausch and Ingmar Bergman), “for the international nature of his contribution to world culture", he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on a number of occasions.

Adonis was born in Syria in 1930 as Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber, but it was as Adonis—the mythological pseudonym he adopted while still a teenager—that he rose to fame; he believed that the Westernizing of his Muslim name would afford him symbolic access to universality and the act of creation. Sentenced to a prison term in his home country for his progressive political views, Adonis went into self-exile in Lebanon and then Paris, where he lives to this day.