Venus Khoury-Ghata was born in Lebanon, in Besherri, the village of Gibran Kahlil Gibran. She studied Literature, and began publishing her poetry in 1969. She has published fourteen novels and thirteen collections of poems. She has been awarded the Apollinaire Prize for Poetry (1980), the Mallarmé Prize (1987), the Grand Prix of the French Society of Authors (1990) and the Prix Supervielle (1998). In 1999, she published a bestselling autobiographical novel, La maison au bord des Larmes (Editions Balland), published in English translation by Graywolf Press, USA, 2005 (trans. Marilyn Hacker), excerpted in Banipal No 24, p56. She lives in Paris.

Her Anthologie personelle, a selection of her previously published and new poems, was published in Paris by Actes Sud in 1997. Her most recent collection, Elle dit, was published by Editions Baland in 1999. Her work has been translated into Italian, Russian, Dutch, German and Arabic, and she was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2000. Her poems, in Marilyn Hacker’s translations, have appeared in the English-speaking world in Ambit, Banipal: a Journal of Modern Arab Literature, Field, Jacket, The Manhattan Review, Metre, Poetry, Shenandoah and Verse.