Anton Shammas is a Palestinian author, translator, and academic who writes primarily in Hebrew and English. His groundbreaking novel Arabesques (1986) collapsed the borders between autobiography and fiction, history and myth. Shammas writes with lyrical irony and a keen sense of fracture — weaving Palestinian memory and exile into the very fabric of the Hebrew language. His work embodies impossibility itself: a Palestinian voice telling stories in the tongue of the other, refusing any neat identity or boundary.

Shammas’s work also extends to essays and translation, where he continues to explore themes of language, exile, and belonging. Readers can find pieces such as “As Arabesques Broke” (Critical Inquiry, 1989), along with his translations of Arabic literature into Hebrew — extensions of the same impossible dialogue between identities and tongues.