Denys Johnson-Davies

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Denys Johnson-Davies (born in 1922 in Vancouver, Canada) is an eminent Arabic-to-English translator who has translated, inter alia, several works by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz,Sudanese author Tayeb Salih and Syrian author Zakaria Tamer.

Denys Johnson-Davies, “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” according to Edward Said, has translated more than twenty-five volumes of short stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and was the first to translate the work of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. He is also interested in Islamic studies and is co-translator of three volumes of Prophetic Hadith. Recently he has written a number of children’s books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, and a collection of his own short stories, Fate of a Prisoner, was published in 1999. Born in Canada, he grew up in Sudan and East Africa and now divides his time between Marrakesh and Cairo.