“I write because in every wall there is a door we have not yet seen.”

Mahdi Mansour is a Lebanese poet living in Paris. He carries the poem the way a physicist carries a question: with a wonder that does not fade, and the certainty that the world is wider than it seems. In his poems love meets exile, the river meets memory, and light meets what the eye cannot see; for him poetry is not an ornament of language but another way of understanding the world, and of belonging to it.

Ever since he first stepped on stage as a young poet, he has believed that a poem is only complete when it reaches people: an evening in Beirut, the stage of the Festival d'Avignon, the voices of Faia Younan and Ahmad Houeili, or a classroom where a student discovers that an equation can be a line of verse. From this belief came his TED talk in Arabic on the shared root of physics and poetry, and his work as a university professor and author of curricula in language, mathematics and climate science.

He has published eight poetry collections, and his poem «Ya Qatily» won the Prince Abdullah Al-Faisal International Prize for Arabic Poetry (2024). He has taken part in the Avignon and Saint-Malo festivals (France), Babylon (Iraq), Jerash (Jordan), and many festivals and evenings across the Arab world and Europe.