Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator based in New York. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard where he earned his doctorate in Arabic literature, and is currently an associate professor of Arabic Literature at New York University. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book, In the Presence of Absence, won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His most recent work is the novel The Book of Collateral Damage, which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2016 and published in English translation in 2019.