Samuel Shimon was born into a poor Assyrian family in 1956 in Iraq. He left his country in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker and got as far as Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo, and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris as a refugee. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He co-founded Banipal, 1997 the renowned international magazine of contemporary Arab literature in English translation. In 2000, he and Margaret Obank edited A Crack in the Wall, poems by sixty contemporary Arab poets. He is the founder (in 2003) and editor of the popular literary website in Arabic www.kikah.com. In 2005 he published his best selling autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris, several editions in Beirut, Cairo, Baghdad, Algeria, and Casablanca. It also appeared in English, French and Swedish editions. In April 2010 he edited Beirut39, an anthology of new Arabic writing, published by Bloomsbury in the UK and USA. In 2018 he edited Baghdad Noir published by Akashic books in New York.
