As The Prophet marked its centenary in 2023, a quiet but remarkable discovery emerged from the archives: Kahlil Gibran was not only the first author in the history of Alfred A. Knopf to design his own publisher's colophon — he was, as far as the record shows, the only one. By Glen Kalem-Habib and Francesco Medici · 13 November 2023 ...
Gibran thought of himself as a painter first. The Drawing Center in New York has gathered his works on paper — many rarely seen — and put the case for the artist rather than the poet. By The Kahlil Gibran Collective ...
Half the Arab world can sing it. Fewer know that the words are Gibran’s, lifted from al-Mawakib in 1964 and set to a melody by a Lebanese composer who had spent years in Brazil. By Francesco Medici ...
Gibran’s first book, a slim essay on music printed in New York in 1905, is the least read and least translated of everything he wrote. During the lockdown of 2020, Francesco Medici set out to bring it into Italian — and did not do it alone. By Francesco Medici ...
Paul-Gordon Chandler’s spiritual biography of Gibran, with a foreword by Bishop Michael B. Curry, arrives in paperback for the centenary of The Prophet. By The Kahlil Gibran Collective ...
For the first time, Gibran’s life and work go on show at United Nations Headquarters in New York — four days only, in the ECOSOC Chamber. By The Kahlil Gibran Collective ...
Amin Beder was not a member of the Pen League, but he moved close to it. When Gibran died in 1931, Beder published a verse elegy in The Syrian World — and gave Gibran the last word. By Francesco Medici ...
An exhibition of Daniel Bonnell’s paintings responding to Gibran opens on Good Friday at St Matthew’s Cathedral in Laramie, Wyoming, and runs through May. By The Kahlil Gibran Collective ...
A century after Knopf first printed it, two new books open the University of North Carolina archive again — one tracing how The Prophet came into being, the other gathering Gibran’s unpublished stories of Lebanon and Syria. By The Kahlil Gibran Collective ...
Ten years ago the Collective found a pocket Prophet printed for American troops and never sold to the public. Now a second wartime artefact has surfaced — a sixteen-inch transcription disc, made for military radio, with Gibran read aloud on it. By Glen Kalem-Habib ...
In May 1946, Mikhail Naimy — Kahlil Gibran's closest friend and biographer — wrote a remarkable letter to Alfred A. Knopf declining to translate Gibran's early Arabic works, while offering an intimate and candid assessment of their friendship, their literary partnership, and the quality of the works themselves. The letter, previously unpublished, is presented here for the first time. By Francesco Medici and Glen Kalem-Habib · 4 January 2023 ...
Gibran asked his readers to imagine an American living in Syria, surrounded by books about Abraham Lincoln written by people who had never been to America. That, he said, was why he wrote his book about Jesus. By Francesco Medici ...
Almustafa’s city of Orphalese was imagined not in the East but on a farm at Buzzards Bay. Gibran spent three weeks there in the spring of 1918 and came back with two-thirds of The Prophet written. By Francesco Medici and Glen Kalem-Habib ...
For twenty years Gibran worked in one room on the third floor of 51 West Tenth Street — a building put up for painters and sculptors, where Oscar Wilde had visited and Bartholdi had modelled Liberty. It was demolished in 1956. Here is who else was in it. By Glen Kalem-Habib and Francesco Medici ...
A little-known Gibran drawing carries a name and a date: Anna Hilda, 1928. Francesco Medici follows the name into Naimy’s autobiography, where a young woman approaches him at a railway station wanting to talk about Gibran. By Francesco Medici ...
In 1996, the Man in Black sat down in a San Bruno studio and read Gibran aloud. The book he read from was itself twice removed from the original — English out of French, French out of Arabic and English. By Philippe Maryssael · Arlon, Belgium, 29 July 2022 ...
Six translators have carried the same twelve lines of Al-Mawakib into English, and no two agree. Nicholas Martin sets them side by side and asks which, if any, is what Gibran actually wrote. By Nicholas Martin ...
Naimy idly sketched a few faces at his desk, then took them to Gibran and said a stranger had drawn them. Gibran studied them a long while and pronounced their author a new Michelangelo. By Mikhail Naimy · Introduced and annotated by Francesco Medici ...
A London-born illustrator has redrawn Almustafa. Pete Katz’s graphic-novel adaptation of The Prophet appeared in 2020 and has since crossed into French. By Philippe Maryssael · Arlon, Belgium, 21 May 2022 ...
Gibran’s one-act play about Lazarus was not published until 1973, forty-two years after his death. But it had already been staged once, in May 1928 — and almost nothing of that première survives. By Francesco Medici ...
