Adonis Ali Ahmad Sa’íd Asbar (1930) was born in a small village in Northern Syria. Writing under the name Adonis since 1947, he moved to Beirut in the 1950s, where – together with Yusuf al-Khall – he cofounded and edited the literary journal Sh’ir [Poetry], the first to publish Western poets in Arabic. Since the 1980s, Adonis has taught at the Sorbonne, Damascus University and the Lebanese University, also leading poetry seminars at the University of Geneva since the 1990s. He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry in his native Arabic; most of these were published in French too. He received the Griffin Poetry Prize for his Selected Poems in 2011, translated by Khaled Mattawa. His other awards and honours include the Bjørnston Prize (2007) and the Goethe Prize (2011).