Sinan Antoon

is a poet, novelist, translator and filmmaker. He was born in Baghdad in 1967 and moved to the USA after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown and Harvard and has a PhD in Arabic literature from the latter. His poetry and articles (Arabic & English) have appeared in various journals and publications.

He has two collections of poems in Arabic, Mawshur Mubalalal bil-Hurub [A Prism; Wet with Wars]. Merit, Cairo) which was published in English as The Baghdad Blues in April 2007 by Harbor Mountain Press, and (One Night in All Cities, Beirut, 2010). His novels are I"jaam – an Iraqi Rhapsody (Arabic, Beirut 2004 and English, City Lights, USA, 2007, and reviewed in Banipal 29). Translations of it have appeared in Italian, German, Portuguese and Norwegian. His second novel, The Pomegranate Alone, is published in Arabic in June 2010 by al-Mu’assassah in Beirut.

His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Arab-American Poetry. He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English. His co-translation of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004 and his translation of Darwish’s last prose book, In the Presence of Absence, is forthcoming from Archipelago in 2010.

returned to Iraq in 2003 to co-produce and co-direct the documentary film About Baghdad on the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq.

To read the review of I"jaam – an Iraqi Rhapsody in Banipal 29, click here.
To read a review of I"jaam – an Iraqi Rhapsody in The Nation, click here.

Sinan Antoon is a contributing editor of Banipal, an editorial committee member of Middle East Report and a member of PEN America. He teaches Arabic literature at New York University.

In June 2007, Harbor Mountain Press published his poetry collection in English translation, Baghdad Blues.

Read more at www.sinaan.com.