Samuel Shimon

(Iraq, 1956)

He was born into a poor Assyrian family in the Iraqi city of Habbaniyah. Since he left his country in December 1978 he has lived in Amman, Beirut, Cyprus, Cairo, Yemen and Tunisia, until he was granted the right of asylum in France in 1985.
Shimon started writing short stories and poetry in the late seventies, publishing the short stories in Jordanian newspapers and the poems in the magazine Al-Karmel by Mahmoud Darwish. While in Paris he published his first poetry collection in Arabic Old Boy (1987) and founded the Gilgamesh publishing house in which eleven books by Arab authors appeared.
In 1996 he moved to London, where he met the English researcher Margaret Obank and, together in 1998, they published the journal Banipal which had the aim of translating Arabic literature into English; they also created the Banipal Foundation to promote Arabic literature on a global scale and annually award the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for the best translation from Arabic to English.
His autobiographical novel Iraqi fi Baris (An Iraqi in Paris) was published in 2005 by Al-Kamel in Beirut, Lebanon and was very well received. It was reprinted in Egypt, Morocco and Algeria. It has been translated into French, English, Swedish, Kurdish and Hebrew. Boyd Tonkin described it in The Independent as "An Arabic response to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer".
In 2001, in collaboration with Margaret Obank, Shimon published in English the Anthology of Arabic poetry, and in 2010, with Bloomsbury House in New York and London, edited and published the anthology Beirut 39, which includes the work of 39 promising young people from the Arab world. In 2007, Samuel was selected by the British Booker Prize to be the first chairman of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the Arab Booker. In 2013, Samuel launched a new cultural magazine called Kikah Magazine for World Literature and published a selection of fourteen short stories by Iraqi writers entitled Baghdad Noir at Akashic House in New York (2018). The book had a Spanish edition of Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2023.
The Spanish version of the magazine Banipal saw the light in the summer of 2020. In a review of the famous German newspaper Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung Samuel Shimon, the editor-in-chief of Banipal, is described as "a tireless promoter in the dissemination of Arabic literature". He is currently working on her second novel Underwear Under War, based on her experience in the ranks of the Palestinian resistance in Beirut during the years of the Lebanese civil war.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

An Assyrian on the streets of Paris. Biography of literary creation