Sinan Antoon

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq and left after the 1991 Gulf War. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard where he earned his doctorate in Arabic literature. He has published two collections of poetry and five novels. His works have been translated into sixteen languages. A new collection of self-translated poems, ‘Postcards from the Underworld’ is forthcoming later this year from Seagull Books. Antoon’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book, ‘In the Presence of Absence’, won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His scholarly works include ‘The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf’ and articles on Arabic poetry and modern Iraqi culture and politics. His essays have appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, The Nation, and The New York Times and many pan-Arab newspapers and journals. He is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at New York University.