Khalil Gibran

Gibran Khalil Gibran, anglicised as Kahlil Gibran, was born on 6 January 1883 in the village of Bsharri in the Maronite highlands of Mount Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1895 his mother emigrated with the children to Boston's South End, where the twelve-year-old Khalil was enrolled at the Denison House settlement school and his unusual drawings caught the attention of the photographer Fred Holland Day.

Sent home to Beirut in 1898 to study Arabic at the Collège de la Sagesse, he returned to Boston in 1902 amid a series of family deaths from tuberculosis. With patronage from the headmistress Mary Haskell he studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910 and then settled in New York's Greenwich Village in 1911, the centre of the Mahjar Arabic-language literary revival.

He wrote first in Arabic — Al-Arwah al-Mutamarrida (Spirits Rebellious, 1908) and Al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (Broken Wings, 1912) — before turning to English. The Madman (1918) and The Forerunner (1920) prepared the ground for The Prophet, published by Alfred A. Knopf on 23 September 1923. Twenty-six prose-poem sermons of the sage Almustafa, it has sold more than ten million copies in English and been translated into over a hundred languages.

He died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at St. Vincent's Hospital, Manhattan, on 10 April 1931, aged forty-eight. His remains were returned to Bsharri and interred in the Mar Sarkis monastery.

The masculine given name Khalil derives from the Arabic khalīl meaning close friend, an honorific traditionally given to Abraham. He bore it as the signal of a poet of universal devotion.