Anton Shammas is a novelist, playwright, poet, essayist and translator. He was born in 1950 in Fassuta, Israel, and lived in Haifa and Jerusalem, where he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He edited the Ash-Sharq Arabic monthly literary magazine in Jerusalem from 1970 to 1975, and worked as a free-lance journalist and columnist for the Hebrew newspapers Kol-Ha’eer, and Ha’eer. He has been living since 1987 in the United States, and teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor since 1989.