Abbas El-Zein was born and raised in Beirut. He was twelve years old when the civil war broke out in 1975. He lived in Beirut through most of the war and, like many Lebanese of his generation, experienced shelling, car bombs, shootings and displacement. Although he came from a family of Shia religious scholars, he attended a French secular school and studied civil engineering at the American University of Beirut. He migrated to Australia in 1996.
Abbas has written essays and short stories about war, identity and displacement for The New York Times, The Age, Meanjin, HEAT and Australian Book Review. His first novel was Tell the Running Water (Sceptre, 2001) and his second book was a memoir about growing up in Beirut called Leave to Remain (U
