Denys Johnson-Davies is considered to be one of the leading Arabic-English translators of our time. In this volume he tells the story of a life in translation, and gives intimate glimpses of many of the Arab writers who are becoming increasingly known in the west. In the 1960s he started an influential Arabic literary magazine, Aswat, which published the leading avant-garde writers of the time, and in 1967 he put together the first representative volume of short stories from the Arab world. Then he really put Arabic writing on the international literary map with the establishment of the Heinemann Arab Authors series. Since then he has continued to select and translate the best of Arabic fiction, most recently the classic novella by Yahya Hakki, The Lamp of Umm Hashim. He has also translated three books of Islamic Hadith and other books of Islamic thought, and has written a large number of children’s books of Middle Eastern history and folktales.