Adonis was born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in Qassabin village, Syria, in 1930. He adopted the name Adonis when he was 17. He has been writing poetry for more than 75 years and is referred to as ‘the grand old man of poetry, secularism and free speech in the Arab world’ or as “The man who remade Arabic poetry” – Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker, December 2017. He co-edited the influential Sh'ir poetry magazine and later established and edited the equally important Mawaqif.
He is author of many collections of poetry, and has published works of criticism, essays and translations. He is translated into many languages, including French, Chinese, Spanish, German and Swedish. Works in English translation include Adonis: Selected Poems, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Sufism and Surrealism, Violence and Islam, Concerto Al-Quds and Songs of Mihyar the Damascene. Other major works are the three-volume Al-Kitab (The Book) and the four-volume Al-Thabit wa al-mutahawwil (The Static and the Dynamic).
Adonis has won numerous awards, including the highest French honour of Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur (2012), Turkey’s Nazim Hikmet Prize (1994), Germany’s prestigious Goethe Prize (Frankfurt, 2011), the US PEN/Nabokov International Literature Lifetime Achievement Award (2017) and China’s Poetry and People Award (2018).