[citation needed] From 1993 to 2009, Khoury served as an editor of Al-Mulhaq, the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Nahar.

[3] Elias Khoury was born in 1948 into a middle-class Greek Orthodox family in the predominantly Christian Ashrafiyye district of Beirut, Lebanon.

At the time he graduated, Lebanese intellectual life was becoming more polarized, with opposition groups adopting pro-Palestinian, radical Arab nationalist stances.

He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled in the wake of an attempted coup against King Hussein, in Black September.

It was followed in 1977 by The Little Mountain (Arabic: الجبل الصغير), set during the Lebanese Civil War, a conflict that Khoury initially thought would be a catalyst for progressive change.

In an interview by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, after the publication of the Hebrew translation of Gate of the Sun, Khoury remarked:"When I was working on this book, I discovered that the "other" is the mirror of the I.

[citation needed] Kirkus Reviews described the book as a "deceptively intricate" story and an "unsparing portrayal of a man without a country, a history or even an identity.

[7] Under his leadership, the magazine criticized controversial aspects of Lebanon's post-Civil War reconstruction, which was led by former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri.

In a 2019 article, Khaled Saghieh wrote that Al-Mulhaq was "foundational in launching the debate over memory that would occupy a wide portion of the Lebanese cultural scene in the 1990s.

"[12] Khoury's works have been translated and published in Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.