Beit Touyour Ayloul

The Beit Touyour Ayloul Foundation turned the house Emily Nasrallah grew up in into a library/cultural center specialized in migration literature.

Emily Nasrallah, née Abi Rashed, was born July 6th, 1931 in Kfeir village, South Lebanon. She passed away on March 13, 2018, in her home in Beirut. She moved from Kfeir to complete her secondary education in Choueifat National College and went on to university at the Beirut University College (now the Lebanese American University) and on to the American University of Beirut where she received her B.A. Degree in Education in 1958.

Novelist, journalist, freelance writer, teacher, lecturer and women's rights activist are some of the activities she has successfully engaged in. She started her journalistic and writing career while still at university. Her first novel, Birds of September, was published in 1962, and won three Arabic literary prizes. It was followed by six novels, eight children's books, thirteen short -tory collections which explore themes such as family roots, Lebanese village life, the war in Lebanon and the struggle of women for independence and self-expression and eleven non-fiction books. She is one of a number of Lebanese women authors known as the Beirut decentrists, who stayed in Beirut, shared the experience of the war and wrote about the conflict. 

She participated in the 1988 International Olympics Authors Festival in Calgary (Canada), and was a panelist and guest reader at the 1989 PEN International Congress in Toronto and Montreal. On August 28th, 2017 Emily was a recipient of the Goethe Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany honoring non-Germans for meritorious contributions in the spirit of the Institute, under the motto “Language is the Key”. on February 6th, 2018, President Michel Aoun decorated her with the Cedar Medal of Honor, Commander Rank, in recognition of her literary contributions.

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