Sinan Antoon

Sinan Antoon left Baghdad in 1991, as the Gulf War was beginning, and rebuilt his life in the United States. He studied at Georgetown and Harvard, and now teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His work extends beyond the page: he co-directed the 2003 documentary About Baghdad and co-founded Jadaliyya, a Middle Eastern literary e-zine that has run since the early 2000s.

His novels and poems keep returning to the same ground: the specific streets and houses of Baghdad as his family knew them, the bodies and kitchens and arguments of a family spread across decades. The style is concrete, sensory, almost tactile. A woman washing a dead body. The smell of cooking oil in a kitchen before the power goes out. The city is felt in the body before it is explained by politics.

The Corpse Washer, which Antoon translated himself from Arabic, received the 2014 Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation and the Arab American Book Award. Ya Maryam was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His poetry, from The Baghdad Blues to Postcards from the Underworld, moves between the intimate and the political without collapsing either into the other.

The book to start with here is The Book of Disappearance, where Antoon translates Ibtisam Azem's novel of a woman searching for her vanished husband in post-invasion Baghdad. It is short, urgent, and devastatingly specific. If that pulls you further in, The Corpse Washer and The Baghdad Eucharist are his own novels, each building a family's story against the backdrop of a city under siege.