The writings of the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa, who has died aged 59 of a heart attack, depict a world of bloody conflict, but one where flowers still bloom. In his books, which are often read as eulogies for Syria, and especially his beloved city of Aleppo, the beauty of the past or an imagined, secular future are set against a deplorable reality, but despite all the atrocities in a country torn by war, the personal triumphs over the political, and the poetic over the grisly.
He wrote six novels, wide in scope, epical and multigenerational. Four of them have been translated into English, by Leri Price, including No Knives in the Kitchens of This City (2013), which won the Naguib Mahfouz medal for literature.
