Published by Philip Jenkins for The Christian Century, June 29, 2018

Sinan Antoon is a star of modern Arab fiction, a multiply honored novelist whose books address critical questions of identity, memory, and history. He has an Iraqi Christian background but teaches at New York Univer­sity—a dislocation that resembles that of so many Middle Eastern Chris­tians in recent years. Antoon’s most recently translated novel, The Baghdad Eucha­rist, offers Westerners an unparalleled opportunity to understand these events. The book traces the historic catastrophe that has overcome—and is now uprooting—one of the world’s oldest Chris­tian communities.

This original contribution by Sinan Antoon was published on March 19th, 2018, in The New York Times.
When I was 12, Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody,” about daily life under Saddam’s authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator, was a young college …

The prize for Arabic Literature was created in 2013 by the Foundation Jean-Luc Lagardère and the Arab World Institute in Paris. The 10,000 euros prize rewards one author (national of a state member of the Arab ligue) of a literary work written or translated into French. The prize will be awarded on October 18th in Paris, by former minister of culture Jack Lang during a ceremony that takes place at the Arab World Institute.

The National, March 29, 2017
he Baghdad Eucharist is a short read but one that lingers long in the mind due to its characters’ candid testimonies. Antoon entrances with both his lavish set-pieces and tight thumbnail sketches. Maha’s miscarriage, together with Youssef’s doomed love affair with a Muslim girl 20 years his junior, show suffering of a different kind. Antoon also manages to convey Youssef’s anguish at the felling and burning of Baghdad’s date palms – “so that the Americans can see the snipers and the snipers can see them”.

Marianne Payot, for L’Express
Published on March 5, 2017
Sinan Antoon brushes off the superb portrait of a man carried away by the maelstrom of the Middle East and raises the veil over Baghdad.
It is the story of a broken destiny, that of a young man who wanted to become a sculptor and who ends up washing the dead. Like his father and all his ancestors before him. A craft that knows no respite in contemporary worn torn Iraq.

Index is without a doubt a literary achievement. The novel explores the limits of literature, and the impossibility for words and for any narrative to convey the extent of the destruction and the feeling of loss.