By Farid Farid, for The Guardian, March 2015
“How do you write about a country that is disintegrating?” says Sinan Antoon, on the line from his office at New York University. His words have taken on a more affective valency in recent days, as the notorious militants from Islamic State (Isis) released footage showing the graphic destruction of Assyrian and Akkadian artefacts in Mosul’s central museum.

Betty Rosen for The Point Magazine, March 2016.
Below a few excerpts. VisitThe Point Magazine‘s website for the full article.
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Of the abundant works of fiction produced by Iraqi writers in the past ten years, Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer and Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition are two of the comparatively few to have appeared in English translation. Antoon published his novel The Corpse Washer in Arabic in 2010 and his own English translation in 2013. The Corpse Exhibition, published in English in 2014 in a translation by Jonathan Wright, contains short …

We’re very proud to share this news: The 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be awarded this week to Sinan Antoon for the translation of his own novel The Corpse Washer, published by Yale University Press.
 Paula Haydar is highly commended for her translation of June Rain by Jabbour Douaihy, published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.
Both June Rain and The Corpse Washer are on RAYA’s list of represented titles.
 The judging panel comprised literary translator and joint winner of the 2013 Prize Jonathan Wright, translator and writer Lulu Norman, broadcaster and writer Paul Blezard, and Banipal editor and trustee Samuel Shimon. They met in December 2014 …

Both Maha and Yusif are not real people. They are characters in Ya Maryam, the novel I started writing after the attack against Sayyidat al-Najat in 2010 and published in Arabic in 2012. But there are hundreds of thousands of real Mahas and Yusifs.

“Crudely realistic, Ave Maris nevertheless plays with tenderness, irony and poetry. Common sense, illusion and laughter are opposed to the barbary of dogmatisms. Against violence and corrupt powers, shine the daily kindnesses, and magical encounters allowing life to take its course.”

Sinan Antoon is another original voice of this new Iraqi narrative