Overview

A fully revised third edition in translation of this best-selling 'gem of autobiographical writing' in the Arab world, by an author who has been called 'a relentless raconteur', 'a modern Odysseus', 'the Iraqi Don Quixote'. Providentially leaving Iraq just before Saddam Hussein installs himself as President, the Assyrian boy dreams of becoming a Hollywood film-maker after his hero John Ford, but after arrest and torture in Syria - accused of being a Jewish spy on account of his name, similar treatment in Jordan, and escaping execution in Lebanon by armed militia, he eventually lands up on the streets of Paris, where he meets up with Jean Valjean and tries to escape his fate as a homeless refugee with wit, humour and amorous adventures, all the while writing the story of his childhood, his deaf-mute father Kika, and film buff Kiryakos. After all his experiences, Samuel Shimon, 'the runaway from museums', writes an urgently needed and timely 'manifesto of tolerance'. Translated from the Arabic by Christina Phillips and Piers Amodia with the author

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9780957442481

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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).

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