“There are so many ways to tell a story”: An Interview with Carlos Martínez Assad

Abstract

In this interview, Carlos Martínez Assad reflects on his transition from a long career as an academic and historian to an author of fiction, as well as what it means to be Lebanese in Mexico. Before delving into the creative world of novels, Martínez Assad taught as a professor of sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As a scholar, he has published prolifically (over twenty books and essays) and received numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Medal of Historic Merit, and the Mexican National Prize of Arts and Sciences. His fiction draws heavily from his academic research into Lebanese Mexican history, and he acknowledges that although fiction grants the author artistic license, his goal is to write fictionalized accounts that are still as accurate as possible. His creative process, he states, is one of imagining how history might be duplicated, allowing for a new encounter with Lebanon, lived again with the family left behind.