Denys Johnson-Davies

Denys Johnson-Davies (Arabic: دنيس جونسون ديڤيز) is an eminent Arabic-into-English literary translator who has translated, inter alia, several works by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish and Syrian author Zakaria Tamer.^[1]

Davies, referred to as “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time” by the late 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. He has also written a number of children’s books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, including a collection of his own short stories, Fate of a Prisoner, which was published in 1999.

Born in 1922, in Vancouver, Canada to English parentage, he spent his childhood in Sudan, Egypt, Uganda, and Kenya, and then was sent to England at age 12. Davies studied Oriental languages at Cambridge, and has lectured translation and English literature at several universities across the Arab World. In 2006, he published his memoirs.

Davies lives in and divides his time between Marrakesh and Cairo.

References

1. ^ Hassan, Abdalla (March 2006). "Spread the Word". Egypt Today. http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6463. Retrieved 2010-12-11. 

External links

• Denys Johnson-Davies on the British Council Literary Translation website^{[dead link]}

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Name	Johnson-Davies, Denys
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Date of birth	1922
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