Maalouf's mother was a staunch Maronite Catholic who insisted on sending him to Collège Notre Dame de Jamhour, a French Jesuit school.

[9] Maalouf worked as the director of An-Nahar, a Beirut-based daily newspaper, until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when he moved to Paris, which became his permanent home.

His book Un fauteuil sur la Seine briefly recounts the lives of those who preceded him in seat #29 as a member of the Académie française.

He was elected a member of the Académie française on 23 June 2011 to fill seat 29, left vacant by the death of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

[3] In 2016, he won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for "Cultural Personality of the Year", the premier category with a prize of 1 million dirhams (approx.

[16] In the same year, the University of Venice Ca' Foscari awarded him the Bauer-Incroci di civiltà prize for fostering cultural dialogue between civilizations.