ABSTRACT
Sinan Antoon was born in 1967 in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and an American mother. He lived in Baghdad and moved to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He earned his BA in English & Arabic and Translation from the University of Baghdad, his MAAS in Contemporary Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf and numerous essays on contemporary Iraqi culture as well as articles on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Sargon Boulus. His essays and creative work in Arabic were published in major journals and venues in the Arab world, on https://Aljazeera.net" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Aljazeera.net, and in The New York Times, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, and Washington Square Journal. Antoon is a co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Arab Studies Journal. In addition to two collections of poetry in Arabic, Antoon has published one poetry collection in English, The Baghdad Blues. His first novel I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody was translated into German, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Italian. His translation of his second novel, Waḥdaha Shajarat al-Rummān, into English as The Corpse Washer appeared from Yale University Press in 2013. Antoon’s The Corpse Washer won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translation, was longlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for best translated fiction, was recognized with the 2017 Arab Literature Prize, and was named as one of the top ten books about the Iraq War by The Guardian. His third novel Ya Maryam was translated into Spanish as Fragmentos de Bagdad by Maria Luz Commedado. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence was released from Archipelago in 2011; he has also translated a selection of Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef’s late work, Nostalgia, My Enemy. In 2003, Antoon co-directed a documentary, About Baghdad, for InCounter Productions. In 2009, Antoon was a postdoctoral fellow at the EUME Program at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in 2013, he was a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin; he was also named a 2016–2017 Fellow by the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. In addition to being granted a Lannan Residency, Antoon received the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association for his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. In 2014, Antoon occupied the position of Distinguished Visiting Creative Writer at the American University in Cairo.
