Etel Adnan (Arabic: إيتيل عدنان; 24 February 1925 – 14 November 2021) was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, novelist, and visual artist, and the author of Sitt Marie Rose. In 2003, the academic journal MELUS called her "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today".

In a 2021 obituary, ArtAsiaPacific wrote that Adnan was known in both literary and artistic circles and had become increasingly visible as a painter later in life; her work was exhibited internationally, including at documenta 13, the Whitney Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Etel N. Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. Adnan's mother, Rose "Lily" Lacorte, was Greek Orthodox from Smyrna and her father, Assaf Kadri, was a Sunni Muslim-Turkish, and a high-ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus, Ottoman Syria.

Assaf Kadri's mother was Albanian. Adnan's grandfather was a Turkish soldier. Her father came from a wealthy family. He was a top officer and former classmate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the military academy. In contrast, Adnan's mother was raised in extreme poverty; her parents met in Smyrna during World War I while her father was serving as an officer in Smyrna. Prior to marrying Adnan's mother, her father was already married with three children. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Adnan's parents migrated to Beirut. Adnan stated that her mother was 16 years old when she met her father, at a time when "the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps."

Adnan grew up in Beirut in a multilingual environment. She spoke Greek and Arabic with her parents, and later recalled that she also spoke Turkish until about the age of five; French became her primary language after she enrolled in a French Lebanese Catholic school at that age. Although Arabic was part of her early linguistic environment, Adnan later said that she wrote in French and English rather than Arabic.

From 1945 to 1949, Adnan studied French literature at the École Supérieure des Lettres in Beirut, a predecessor to the later Saint Joseph University of Beirut's Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. She then received a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne (then part of the University of Paris), where she earned a degree in philosophy. In 1955, she moved to the United States for postgraduate study in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College in San Rafael, California.

Adnan returned from the US to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al Safa newspaper, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. In addition, she also helped build the cultural section of the newspaper, occasionally contributing cartoons and illustrations. Her tenure at Al Safa was most notable for her front-page editorials, commenting on the important political issues of the day.

In her later years, Adnan began to openly identify as lesbian. She met her partner Simone Fattal in 1972 and the couple lived together until Adnan's death. The two of them worked together on The Post-Apollo Press which was founded by Fattal in 1982, and where Adnan was a vital contributor as an author and translator.