Shimon Ballas

was born in Baghdad in 1930 and immigrated to Israel in 1951. A major novelist, he has published more than fifteen works of fiction, including Outcast, excerpted in Banipal No 21, a unique chronicle of Iraqi history, in addition to several important studies on contemporary Arabic literature, and numerous translations from Arabic. His important study, Arab Literature Under the Shadow of War, which had begun as his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, appeared in 1978. He continues to write critical works in Arabic, the most recent of which is Secular Trends in Arabic Literature (al-Kamel Verlag, Cologne, Germany). Shimon Ballas is retired from the Department of Arabic Literature at Haifa University and now spends part of the year in Paris where he does much of his writing.