Anton Shammas

is a Palestinian poet and author, essayist and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English. His novel Arabesques, the first novel by a Palestinian to be written in Hebrew (Hebrew: Tel Aviv, 1986; English: Viking, 1988; Penguin International Writers, 1990) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best seven novels of 1988.

He has written three plays and has a number of poetry collections,, and translated plays of Dario Fo, Athol Fugard, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee into Arabic and Hebrew, as well as a number of works of Hebrew literature into Arabic. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, where he has lived since 1987. He is a contributing editor of Banipal