Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in Arabic literature. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and a forthcoming book on the Iraqi poet, Sargon Boulus. He has published academic articles on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef, and on contemporary Iraqi culture. His essays in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world. He writes a bi-weekly column for the London-based, pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Araby. His essays and op-eds in English have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, and Ploughshares.
Antoon has published two collections of poetry in Arabic and two in English: The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull Books, 2023). He has published five novels in Arabic. Translations of his novels have appeared in sixteen languages. His own translation of his second novel Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (Beirut, 2010) into English as The Corpse Washer for Yale University Press in 2013 was recognized with a 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translation, was longlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for best translated fiction, and won the 2013 Arab American Book Prize. His translations from the Arabic include Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago, 2011) which won the 2012 American Literary Translators Association Award and a co-translation (with Peter Money) of a selection of Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef's late work, Nostalgia; My Enemy (Graywolf, 2012). He also translated Ibtisam Azem's novel, The Book of Disappearance (Syracuse University Press, 2019).
Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. In 2014, Antoon was the Distinguished Visiting Creative Writer at the American University in Cairo. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin in 2016. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and associate professor at New York University.
ترى هل تعد حرب الإبادة الشاملة التي تشنّها إسرائيل ضد الفلسطينيين في غزّة، من بين أكثر مشاكل العالم تعقيداً بنظر من يحتلّون مناصبهم في مجالس أمناء الجامعات المرموقة، والرؤساء الذين واللواتي يقع اختيارهم عليهم، وعليهن؟ وما الدور الذي لعبته جامعة كولومبيا ورئيستها في التعامل مع مشكلة بالغة التعقيد كهذه؟
