Evelyne Accad
Evelyne Accad is a Lebanese-born educator and writer living in the United States, France and Lebanon.
Life
Accad is the daughter of a Swiss mother and a father of Lebanese and Egyptian descent. She was born in Beirut in 1943 and grew up in Lebanon and came to the United States in the early 1960s. She was educated at the Beirut College for Women, Anderson College, Ball State University and Indiana University Bloomington, receiving a PhD in comparative literature from the latter institution. Accad taught at Beirut University College in 1978 and 1984 and at Northwestern University in 1991. She is Professor Emerita in Francophone, Arabophone, African, Middle East, Women's Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the Lebanese American University in Beirut.She published her first novel L'Excisée in 1982; it was translated into English as The Excised in 1989. This novel deals with excision of women in both the physical and metaphorical sense.
Although she has her own unique style, Accad was strongly influenced by the Egyptian-born French writer Andrée Chedid and the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi.