User:MARIEMATH1988/Mohamed Taan

Mohamed Taan (in Arabic محمد طعان) is a French-speaking Lebanese writer, born in Tyre (South Lebanon) in 1952. He is also a surgeon by profession.

Biography
Born in Lebanon, Mohamad Taan made his first trip at the age of 6 and went to Ivory Coast. He joined his family there and, once his primary school was completed, he returned to Lebanon for his secondary school. Once he obtained his baccalaureate (at the age of 15), he continued his studies in medicine and surgery at the Paul-Sabatier University in Toulouse and became a surgeon for the Ministry of Public Health in Morocco and lived in the city of Casablanca for 5 years.

He returned to Lebanon in 1984 with the wish to open a hospital in his region of origin. However, the civil war that has been raging there for 9 years does not allow it. He treats war wounded and witnesses atrocities.

In 1987, he moved to Nigeria and opened a clinic in Lagos.

He has lived for more than thirty years between Lebanon, Nigeria and France.

Beginnings as a novelist
Passionate about cinema, he writes scenarios as an amateur. In 1993, he presented one to the director and screenwriter Nouri Bouzid who advised him to turn it into a novel:

"At the beginning of this book was a scenario entitled The Father, the Son and the Legion that I proposed to Nouri Bouzid (...). By completely rewriting this script, I made a novel out of it."

Having never pursued literary ambitions, it will take him 3 years to take the plunge and embark on a career as a novelist. He adapts his screenplay in three months, and is published the following year. "The Peanut years" was released in 1997 by Présence africaine publishing house.

Mohamed Taan has published ten novels, all translated into Arabic and Persian, and some into English, German, Turkish, Hausa or Swahili.

His latest novel, "C'est la faute à Flaubert", is available in French and Arabic. In this book, Mohamed Taan reveals the homosexuality of the French writer.

Schools visits
Celestin Freinet school (Sidon).

Cultural participation
Arab book fair (Beirut) 2022

Books

 * Arachide, novel, Présence africaine, 1997, preselected for the prix Méditerranée and France-Liban ISBN 2-7087-0639-X
 * Nostalgie, novel, FMA, 1999
 * L'Été du chirurgien, novel, L’Harmattan, Collection écritures arabe, 2001 ISBN 2-7475-0845-5
 * Khawaja, novel, L’Harmattan, collection Lettres du monde arabe, 2002 ISBN 2-7475-1932-5
 * Bahmane, novel, L’Harmattan, collection Lettres du monde arabe, 2004 ISBN 9782747559539
 * Le Sayyed de Bagdad, novel, L’Arganier, 2006 ISBN 9782912728395
 * Les Réfugiés de Peshawar, novel, 2nd edition, L’Harmattan, 2019 ISBN 978-2-343-17001-5
 * Le Pèlerin de Oujda, novel, Atelier Oser Dire, 2014
 * C’est la faute à Flaubert, novel, Saint Honoré, historical fiction, 2019 ISBN 9782407013951

Mohamed Taan's work is interspersed with his personal experiences as a surgeon who lived between the Middle East, Europe and Africa. We find these different regions of the world through his novels often inspired by historical facts.

The novels Nostalgie, The Summer of the Surgeon and Khawaja have the backdrop of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s, while with The Sayyed of Baghdad, Taan gives us an Arab point of view on the war in Iraq waged by the United States in 2003.