Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar of modern Arabic literature and contemporary Arab culture and politics. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Baghdad Blues, and a novel, I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody. His co-translation of Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, a selection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004. His other translations from the Arabic include Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago, 2011) and a selection of Saadi Youssef’s late work, Nostalgia, My Enemy (Graywolf, 2012). His translation of Toni Morrison’s Home is forthcoming in Arabic in 2014.
In 2003, Antoon returned to his native Baghdad to co-direct a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. In 2013 he was a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and currently is an assistant professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.