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Anton Shammas

Anton Shammas is a writer, poet and translator who works in Arabic, Hebrew and English, known for his Hebrew novel Arabesques.

born 1950The Hebrew novel ArabesquesTranslating Emile Habibi into HebrewPoetry in Arabic and Hebrew

Born: 8 September 1950, Fassuta
Occupation: linguist, poet, translator, writer
Education: International Writing Program, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Anton Shammas was born in 1950 in Fassuta

Anton Shammas was born on September 8, 1950, in Fassuta, a Christian Arab village in the Western Galilee. He was one of 6 children of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother who had come to Fassuta in 1937 to teach. In 1962 the family moved to Haifa, where he attended an integrated Jewish-Arab high school.

In 1968 he moved to Jerusalem. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he studied English and Arabic literature and art history.

He helped found the Arabic literary magazine Al-Sharq and served as its editor. In 1974 he published poetry collections in Arabic and in Hebrew, and in 1976 he began working as a producer for Arabic programs on Israeli television. He also wrote for Hebrew newspapers on Arab identity in a Jewish state and translated works of Emile Habibi into Hebrew.

His Hebrew novel Arabesques appeared in 1986 and was translated into several languages. In 1987 he left for the United States, where he teaches comparative literature at the University of Michigan.