Marc Basset writes what humans feel

Marc Basset published his first book at sixteen. He holds a degree in biomedical engineering. He acts. He writes novels. He is, by any standard measure, doing several things at once, and doing them earlier than most people start doing any one of them. On Young Writers Day, The Beiruter sat down with Basset to talk about what drives a young Lebanese writer to put words on a page when the world around him offers plenty of reasons not to.

The need to express oneself

His love for writing began in childhood, when he “used to create entire worlds with my toys. I would invent stories, characters, and conflicts, losing myself in the act of storytelling without even realizing it was something I could one day pursue seriously.”

He denotes,

I was fortunate to be encouraged by those around me; family, friends, and a deeply artistic entourage who believed in the value of expression and imagination.

That impulse produced his debut, “Fades: In the Memory of My Flashbacks”, published when he was still in secondary school. The book was, by his own account, a way of imposing order on emotions that felt unmanageable at the time. “Publishing at a young age wasn’t about rushing,” he explains. “It was about feeling ready to share.”

His biggest inspiration is his grandmother. “As a kid up until now, I listen to her stories of the past." She inspired him to write his second book, “The Unfolded Story of Sasha Soar”, which he published in 2025, confirmed that the impulse had matured into craft. Basset had found language for feelings and relationships that people recognized from their own lives. He sold around 400 copies of the book, which in his words, “follows a grandmother who gives her granddaughter a diary after six years apart, following the death of her son. Through this diary, hidden stories from the grandmother’s childhood during World War I are revealed, while also uncovering family secrets, inheritance issues, and the dynamics and relationships that have grown distant over the years."

“A lot of people resonated with what I wrote,” he says. The validation, he notes, is what keeps him going: the knowledge that even one reader connecting with his work justifies the entire process.

Basset self-published his books. “I did so due to a lack of support from the government or publishing houses,” he says. Today, his books can be found in libraries like Antoine Library and Virgin, along with several popular coffee shops across Beirut.

Studying what it means to be human

The biomedical engineering degree is the detail that tends to catch people off guard. Most writers come from humanities programs. But Basset sees no contradiction. “Biomedical engineering is all about understanding how the human body works, systems, signals, responses,” he says. “Acting and writing are about understanding how humans feel, think, and behave. I don’t see them as separate, I see them as two ways of studying the same thing: what it means to be human.”

The acting, in particular, feeds the writing in concrete ways. Basset approaches characters on the page the way he would approach a role: from the inside out.

When I build a character, I’m already thinking about how they move, react, and exist in a scene, not just what they say.

The result is prose populated by people who feel inhabited rather than described, characters whose physicality and hesitations carry as much meaning as their dialogue.

What he keeps returning to

Basset’s recurring themes are profoundly human: self-discovery, family, resilience, and the complexity of human relationships. He tends to write novels, and his novels tend to center on women, on belonging, on the tension between who people are and who their circumstances require them to be. “These are things everyone experiences, but rarely in the same way,” he says.

There’s always something new to uncover in them, both as a writer and as a person.

The architecture of his novels grows outward from a single emotional truth, which may explain why his work reads as intimate even when its scope is wide.

Writing from Lebanon

Geography is never neutral for a Lebanese writer, and Basset does not pretend otherwise.

Growing up in Lebanon, especially in this generation, means living with contrast, beauty and struggle, hope and uncertainty, all at once.

That environment produces a particular kind of awareness, an intensity that shapes not only what he writes about but how he writes it: grounded, emotionally honest, unwilling to look away from difficulty even inside fiction.

It also produces urgency. Young Lebanese writers are not working in a vacuum of comfortable literary ambition. They are writing from a country in crisis, and the crisis lends their voices a weight that has nothing to do with age. Basset is direct about what that means for the institutions around them: publishing houses, production companies, and cultural organizations need to take young voices seriously, not as promising futures but as present contributors. “Young voices aren’t incomplete,” he says. “They’re just different. They reflect the present moment in a way that’s immediate and unfiltered. There’s value in that honesty, and it deserves to be heard without being dismissed as ‘too early’ or ‘not experienced enough.’”

A love letter

When asked if he had a message for Lebanon, Basset’s answer was short, and it did not try to be literary. It was the kind of thing a person says when they mean it completely:

“To Lebanon, no matter how heavy things get, you’ve taught me how to keep creating, hoping, and staying. I love you endlessly.”

Marc Basset is a twenty-eight-year-old biomedical engineer, actor, novelist twice over, and a writer who ignites passion. On Young Writers Day, he is exactly the kind of voice the occasion was made for.