Early life

Khalifa was born in the village Urum al-Sughra near the city of Aleppo, on 1 January 1964 to a family of olive farmers and traders of agricultural machinery.^[4] Khalifa’s extended family was engaged in olive cultivation and the production of olive oil, as well as in the trade of spare parts for trucks, cars and agricultural machines. He was the fifth child in a family of nine boys, four girls, two mothers, and a father who worked as a policeman until he retired in 1965. He studied in the city of Aleppo, where his family then resided, and graduated from Al-Mutanabbi High School in 1982. He continued his studies at the University of Aleppo and graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1988.^[1][5][6]

Khalifa began his literary activity at the age of fifteen by publishing his poems in the Syrian Ba’athist Al-Thawra newspaper. He also participated in the University of Aleppo Forum, one of the most famous literature festivals in Syria.^[5] This celebration attracted a large audience of students and other citizens, before the authorities closed it down in 1988 under the pretext that leftist opposition politicians used its platform to publicize their ideas.^[4]

Screenwriting

As a screenwriter, Khalifa had written several television dramas, including Rainbow (Kaws Kozah) and Memoirs of Al-Jalali (Arabic: سيرة الجلالي, romanized: Serat Al-Jalali), plus various documentaries, short films, and the feature-length film The Shrine Door (Arabic: باب المقام, romanized: Bab al-Maqam).^[7]

Novels

Khaled Khalifa began writing novels at the age of twenty and continued writing poetry as a way to exercise his literary skills. He wrote his first novel as a university student, but destroyed it immediately thereafter. That novel, he then felt, heavily borrowed other authors’ voices. He thus began searching for his own literary voice. In 1990, soon after graduating and completing his military service in Damascus, he stopped drawing and writing poetry, and devoted himself completely to novels and screenplays.^[5]

His first published novel, Haris al-Khadi'a^[8] ("The Guard of Deception"),^[4] was released in 1993. His second novel, Dafatir al-Qurbat^[8] ("The Gypsy Notebooks"),^[4] was suppressed by the Arab Writers Union for four years after its publication in 2000.^[8] Khalifa spent thirteen years working on In Praise of Hatred (Madih al-karahiya), his third novel, which was about how the lives of one family are affected by the conflict in Hama between the Syrian government and the Muslim Brotherhood.^[8] It was published in Damascus in 2006 until it was banned by the Syrian government, and republished in Beirut.^[4] Khalifa had stated these sort of book bans came from a bureaucracy which does not represent the higher levels of government,^[2] and he favoured negotiation between artists and Syrian authorities to facilitate freedom of speech.^[9] He said his work was not intended to advocate any political ideology.^[8]

Discussing In Praise of Hatred, he stated:

above all, I wrote this novel in defense of the Syrian people and in order to protest against the suffering they have endured as a result of the religious and political dogmas that have tried to negate their ten-thousand-year civilization.^[7]In Praise of Hatred^[4] was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) (2008).^[8]

His fourth novel was La sakakin fi matabikh hazihi al-madina ("No Knives in this City's Kitchens"), published in Cairo in 2013. It was about the "price that Syrians have paid under the rule of the Baath party" as headed by President Bashar Al-Assad. It won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.^[10] It was shortlisted for the IPAF in 2014.^[11] Death Is Hard Work, translated by Leri Price, was named a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.^[12] No One Prayed Over Their Graves, Khalifa's sixth novel, was longlisted for the IPAF in 2020.^[1] In September 2023, the English translation was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.^[13]