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Walid Juffali
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Walid Juffali | |
|---|---|
| Born | Walid Ahmed Juffali 1954/1955 (age 60–61)[1] |
| Nationality | Saudi |
| Alma mater | University of San Diego Imperial College London |
| Known for | chairman of E. A. Juffali and Brothers |
| Net worth | £4 billion (June 2015)[2] |
| Spouse(s) | Basma Al-Sulaiman (1980-2000) Christina Estrada (2001-14) Loujain Adada (m. 2012) |
| Children | Four; Three with Basma Al-Sulaiman, one with Christina Estrada |
| Parent(s) | Ahmed Abdullah Juffali |
| Relatives | Khaled Juffali (brother) |
Walid Ahmed Juffali (born 1954/1955) is a Saudi billionaire heir and businessman. He serves as the chairman of E. A. Juffali and Brothers, one of Saudi Arabia's largest companies.
Early life[edit]
Juffali is the son of Ahmed Abdullah Juffali (1924-1994),[3] the founder of E. A. Juffali and Brothers, one of Saudi Arabia's largest companies.[4] His younger brother is Khaled Juffali, and his sister is Maha Juffali.[5] His brother Tarek Juffali died in 2006 from a drug overdose, and had been "a heavy heroin and cocaine user and also took Rohypnol and smoked 30 cannabis joints a day".[6]
Education[edit]
In 2012, he received a doctorate in neuroscience from Imperial College London.[1][9] His PhD thesis was entitled, "A Novel Algorithm for Detection and Prediction of Neural Anomalies", and his supervisor was Chris Toumazou.[10]
Career[edit]
Juffali serves as the chairman of E. A. Juffali and Brothers,[1] a position he has held since at least 2005.[11]
In 2005, Juffali was also chairman of Saudi American Bank, deputy chairman of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Honorary Consul-General for Denmark.[11]
In December 2005, the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) announced that Juffali would host its entrepreneurial reality show, The Investor, which would be shown early in 2006.[11] In her book Arab Television Today, Naomi Sakr, compared the show to the global TV franchise The Apprentice, but noted that each of the 13 pairs of would-be entrepreneurs had to be from the same family, to reflect the "family aspect of business in the Arab world".[12]
Juffali also has a separate company, W Investments, a private wealth management company.[9] The CEO is Jamil El Imad, who is also managing director and chief scientist of his NeuroPro company.[13]
Legal immunity[edit]
On 9 November 2015, The Daily Telegraph reported that Juffali had gained legal immunity in the UK, having been appointed as St Lucia's "Permanent Representative" to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which is headquartered in London.[1]
Two days later, St Lucia's Office of the Prime Minister issued a statement, confirming that Juffali was appointed to the role in April 2014, "that all necessary due diligence was done prior to the appointment", and it declined the request from his ex-wife's lawyers to "lift the diplomatic immunity of Dr. Juffali to compel Dr. Juffali to testify in the civil suit ... this is a civil matter in which it does not desire to get involved."[14]
Personal life[edit]
Juffali's first wife was fellow Saudi, Basma Al-Sulaiman, who received £40 million in a divorce settlement in 2000.[2] They married in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1980, where they lived in a marble palace. Guests of Juffali in Jeddah included Margaret Thatcher, John Major and George H. W. Bush.[15] They had three children.[16]
In 2001 Juffali married Christina Estrada, an American former Pirelli Calendar model, but they divorced in 2014.[1] Estrada started divorce proceedings in 2012, after he married Loujain Adada (Saudi law allows up to four wives), and has made a claim against Juffali for at least his three UK properties, which include a seven-bedroom home in Knightsbridge, London, in a converted church, valued in total at about £60 million. Juffali and Estrada have a teenage daughter.[2]
Juffali was one of three Saudi businessmen who donated at least $1 million to the Clinton Presidential Center.[17]
In November 2012, Juffali married the 25-year-old Lebanese model and TV presenter Loujain Adada in Venice.
E. A. Juffali and Brothers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Private | |
| Founded | 1946 |
| Headquarters | Jeddah, Saudi Arabia |
Key people
| Walid Juffali, chairman Khaled Juffali, vice chairman |
| Website | http://www.eajb.com |
Ebrahim A. Juffali and Brothers is Saudi Arabia's largest commercial enterprise. Founded in 1946, its expansion coincided with the country's growth, and by the mid 1970s, the Juffali Group had firmly established itself as the largest business house in the Middle East, with 49,218 employees worldwide.[1]
Juffali was responsible for developing the first power generation (electricity), and telecommunication in Saudi Arabia. as-well as television concessions.[2]Later on the Al Juffali group introduced many other fields to Saudi Arabia such as power utilities, construction, insurance, telecommunications, and vehicle manufacturing and distribution. Their joint venture partners include international companies such as, Daimler AG, Bosch,Dow Chemical, Fluor Corp, Carrier, DuPont, Ericsson, IBM, Liebherr, Michelin, Massey Ferguson, Siemens AG, Nabors Industries.[3]
The group's growth, steered in large part by His Excellency Sheikh Ahmed bin Abdullah Al-Juffali (1914–1994), and his brothers, Ebrahim and Ali. The company is run by their sons, Sheikh Khaled and Sheikh Walid Al Juffali. They are also supported by their cousins and professional staff managing a wide range of investments, manufacturing, finance, real estate, distribution, and oil drilling throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America.[4]
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Derek Walcott
| Derek Walcott | |
|---|---|
Walcott at an honorary dinner in Amsterdam, 20 May 2008
| |
| Born | Derek Alton Walcott 23 January 1930 Castries, Saint Lucia |
| Occupation | Poet, playwright, professor |
| Nationality | Saint Lucian |
| Genre | Poetry and plays |
| Notable works | Omeros |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature 1992 T. S. Eliot Prize 2011 |
| Children | Peter Walcott, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Anna Walcott-Hardy |
| Signature |  |
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros(1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement."[2][3] In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, aMacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature[4] and the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets.[5]
Early life and education[edit]
Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies with a twin brother, the future playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of African and European descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island which he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house.[6] His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at age 31 from mastoiditis while his wife was pregnant with the twins Derek and Roderick, who were born after his death.[6] Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.
As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them.[6]
He studied as a writer, becoming “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.[3] Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote:
Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.[6]
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse.[6]
At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem in the newspaper, The Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper.[6] By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs.[7] He later commented,
The influential Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.[6]
With a scholarship, he studied at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.[8]
Career[edit]
After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist.[8] Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.[7]
Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) attracted international attention.[3]His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Companyoff-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[9] The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.[10]
He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis and retiring in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the US after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irish Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.
His epic poem, Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from The Iliad, has been critically praised "as Walcott's major achievement."[2] The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose the book as one of its "Best Books of 1990".
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the first Caribbean writer to receive the honor. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”[3] He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[11] for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.
His later poetry collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors;[12] The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize.[3][8]
In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.[13]
Oxford Professor of Poetry candidacy[edit]
In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of documented accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996.[14] (The latter case was settled by Boston University out of court.)[15] When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, their interest was aroused in the university decisions.[16][17]
Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases.[18][19] Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned.[18][20] Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and journalists including Libby Purves, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the American Macy Halford and the Canadian Suzanne Gardner attributed the criticism of her to misogyny[21][22] and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumor.[23][24]
Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore.[25] Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination".[26] Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.[27][28]
Writing[edit]
Themes[edit]
Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented, "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote, "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature."[6] He also notes, "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."[6]
Influences[edit]
Walcott has said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.[6]
Playwriting[edit]
He has published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.
Essays[edit]
In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:
Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage.[6] In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes, "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."[6]
Omeros[edit]
Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters fromThe Iliad. Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.
Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts(where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition) and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that's headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, andToronto.
Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.[29]
Criticism and praise[edit]
Walcott's work has received praise from major poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries",[30] and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language."[31] Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".
Awards and honours[edit]
- 1969 Cholmondeley Award
- 1971 Obie Award for Best Foreign Play (for Dream on Monkey Mountain)
- 1972 Officer of the Order of the British Empire[10]
- 1981 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ("genius award")
- 1988 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
- 1990 Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize
- 1990 W. H. Smith Literary Award (for poetry Omeros)
- 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature
- 2004 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement[11]
- 2008 Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex
- 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize (for poetry collection White Egrets)[5]
- 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (for White Egrets)
List of works[edit]
- Works about Derek Walcott in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Works by Derek Walcott at Open Library
- Poetry collections
- 1948 25 Poems
- 1949 Epitaph for the Young: Xll Cantos
- 1951 Poems
- 1962 In a Green Night: Poems 1948—60
- 1964 Selected Poems
- 1965 The Castaway and Other Poems
- 1969 The Gulf and Other Poems
- 1973 Another Life
- 1976 Sea Grapes
- 1979 The Star-Apple Kingdom
- 1981 Selected Poetry
- 1981 The Fortunate Traveller
- 1983 The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden
- 1984 Midsummer
- 1986 Collected Poems, 1948-1984, featuring "Love After Love"
- 1987 "Central America"
- 1987 The Arkansas Testament
- 1990 Omeros
- 1997 The Bounty
- 2000 Tiepolo's Hound, includes Walcott's watercolors
- 2004 The Prodigal
- 2007 Selected Poems (edited, selected, and with an introduction by Edward Baugh)
- 2010 White Egrets
- 2014 The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
- Plays
- (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes
- (1951) Harry Dernier: A Play for Radio Production
- (1953) Wine of the Country
- (1954) The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act
- (1957) Ione
- (1958) Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama
- (1958) Ti-Jean and His Brothers
- (1966) Malcochon: or, Six in the Rain
- (1967) Dream on Monkey Mountain
- (1970) In a Fine Castle
- (1974) The Joker of Seville
- (1974) The Charlatan
- (1976) O Babylon!
- (1977) Remembrance
- (1978) Pantomime (Walcott play)
- (1980) The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!: Two Plays
- (1982) The Isle Is Full of Noises
- (1984) "The Haitian Earth"
- (1986) Three Plays The Last Carnival, Beef, No Chicken, and A Branch of the Blue Nile)
- (1991) Steel
- (1993) Odyssey: A Stage Version
- (1997) The Capeman (book and lyrics, both in collaboration with Paul Simon)
- (2002) Walker and The Ghost Dance
- (2011) Moon-Child
- (2014) O Starry Starry Night
- Other books
- (1950) Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, Barbados Advocate (Barbados)
- (1990) The Poet in the Theatre, Poetry Book Society (London)
- (1993) The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory Farrar, Straus (New York)
- (1996) Conversations with Derek Walcott, University of Mississippi (Jackson, MS)
- (1996) (With Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney) Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar, Straus (New York)
- (1998) What the Twilight Says (essays), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
- (2002) Walker and Ghost Dance, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY)
- (2004) Another Life: Fully Annotated, Lynne Rienner Publishers (Boulder, CO)
Further reading
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