Banipal Issue 67

Samuel Shimon was born into a poor Assyrian family in Iraq in 1956. He left his country in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, travelling via Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. He began writing autobiographical short stories in 1979, which were published in Arab newspapers, and poetry in 1985. In Paris his small press, Editions Gilgamesh, published a number of volumes of poetry and fiction by Arab authors including two collections of his own, Old Boy and Rain of my Mother’s Letters. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since, working as a journalist. His passion for literature led him in 1998 to co-found Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation, which became internationally renowned. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Spanish edition of Banipal magazine, which he set up in 2020. A profile in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2003 described him as “the Initiator” and “a tireless missionary for literary matters”. In 2005 his autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris was published in Arabic, with a limited edition in English translation published the same year. A continuing best-seller in Arabic, described as “a manifesto of tolerance”, it is published in Moroccan, Lebanese and Egyptian editions. In 2002, he founded and edited the hugely popular Arabic literary website www.kikah.com for a number of years, then, in 2013 started Kikah Arabic magazine for international literature (both closed due to lack of funding). He also edited A Crack in the Wall (2000), poems by sixty Arab poets from the last two decades of the 20th Century, was editor of Beirut39: New Writing from the Arab World (2010), and the short story collection Baghdad Noir (2018).