Paul Starkey

is Professor of Arabic Head of the Arabic Department at Durham University (For full details click here).  He is a deputy director of CASAW, the Centre for Advanced Study of the Arab World – for more details please click here.

He read Arabic and Persian Language and literature at Oxford University. He has published numerous scholarly articles on aspects of the Arab novel and on particular Arab authors such as Edwar al-Kharrat and Sonallah Ibrahim. He is author of From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfiq Hakim and was a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. He is currently working on a study of the Egyptian ‘generation of the sixties, in particular the Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim, to be published by Edinburgh University Press.

He has translated a number of works by contemporary Arab authors including Dear Mr Kawabata by Rachid al-Daif (Quartet, 2000), Stones of Bobello by Edwar al-Kharrat (Saqi, 2005) for the European Cultural Foundation’s publishing project Mémoires de la Méditerranée, Turki al-Hamad’s Shumaisi (Saqi, 2005), Mansoura Ez-Eldin's Maryam's Maze, parts of Samuel Shimon's An Iraqi in Paris published in the Banipal magazine and by Banipal Books. 

He is a contributing editor of Banipal and is chair of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.  In 2007-8 he was a judge of the inaugural year of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.