Sinan Antoon

Born in Baghdad in 1967 and educated at the University of Baghdad, Antoon left Iraq in 1991 after the first Gulf War and completed a PhD at Harvard. He teaches at NYU and translates between Arabic and English in both directions — most notably his English version of Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence won the National Translation Award in 2012.

His novels — I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (2004), The Corpse Washer (2010), Ya Maryam (2012; English: The Baghdad Eucharist), Fihris (2016; The Book of Collateral Damage) — make a quiet, devastating record of Iraq under sanctions, occupation, and sectarian war. The Corpse Washer, the story of a young Baghdadi who inherits his father's ritual washing of Shi'a dead during the worst years of the war, won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.