[2][3] She was the daughter of Selim Saab, a Maronite Christian born in Baabda, Lebanon; and Alice Khoury, who was from Damascus, Syria.

When she was 22, she married Louis Selim Chedid, a Lebanese physician from a Maronite bourgeois family in Cairo and former research director at the National Center for Scientific Research, honorary professor of the Institute Pasteur and author of several books such as The heart remains and Babel which he wrote with his wife Andree.

Her best-known work is the novel L'Autre which has been translated into many languages and tells of the rescue from an earthquake spilled by an ancient Egyptian.

Chedid has written twenty-three volumes of poetry, eighteen novels, more than a hundred short stories, eight plays and nine children's books.

In an appraisal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called her part of a "generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals who chose France as their new home after the war, helping the country to a literary renaissance".

[6] Several schools in France bear her name: in Rennes, in the Villejean district, in Anstaing (North) and in Aigrefeuille-sur-Maine 9 (Loire-Atlantique).