Samuel Shimon

Samuel Shimon was born into Assyrian family in 1956 in Iraq. He left his country in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, and got as far as Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He co-founded Banipal the renowned international magazine of contemporary Arab literature in English translation and is its editor-in-chief. He is the founder (in 2003) and editor of the popular literary website in Arabic kikah magazine. In 2005 he published his bestselling autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris, several editions in Beirut, Cairo and Casablanca. It also appeared in English, French, Spanish, Kurdish, Swedish and Hebrew editions. In April 2010 he edited Beirut39, an anthology of new Arabic writing, published by Bloomsbury in UK and USA. He is the editor of Baghdad Noir, an anthology of Iraqi shot stories with Akashic Publishing, New York 2018. Samuel was the Chair of judges for the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2008. Since 2020 he is the Editor of Spanish version of Banipal magazine. A profile in the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung in 2003 described him as “the Initiator” and “a tireless missionary for literary matters”.