Etel Adnan, an influential Lebanese American writer who wrote a seminal novel about the Lebanese civil war and achieved acclaim in her later years as a visual artist, died on Sunday in Paris.
Ms. Adnan also wrote numerous collections of poetry.
In her poetry, novels and nonfiction, Ms. Adnan often wrote about political discord and violence.
Ms. Adnan caught the attention of the international art world in her late 80s, when her paintings were included in Documenta 13, the contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2012.
Since then, her work has appeared in numerous international exhibitions and art fairs, including the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2014.
Her father, Assaf Kadri, a Syrian born in Damascus, was a retired high-ranking official in the Ottoman army and a former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey.
A few years later, she moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard before settling in California.
“The head of the art department wondered how I can teach such a course without practicing painting,” she told The Paris Review Daily.
It was there that she wrote “Sitt Marie Rose,” which was originally published in French, the language she knew best.
Ms. Adnan returned to California in the late 1970s, living in Sausalito, in the Bay Area.
In addition to her taut yet cheerful paintings, Ms. Adnan also drew praise for her leporellos, books folded like an accordion on which she combined drawings, splashes of color and Arabic words and numbers.
In 2018, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art presented a selection of Ms. Adnan’s paintings alongside some of her written works.