In July 2026 Banipal Books releases a reprint of the revised third edition of An Iraqi in Paris in English translation, which has been out of print for almost a year. The paperback reprint, not the e-book has a completely new design, with new cover and a total of 336 pages. An Iraqi in Paris is known throughout the Arab world as the best-selling “gem of autobiographical writing”, by an author who has been called “a relentless raconteur”, “a modern Odysseus”, “the Iraqi Don Quixote”. Providentially leaving Iraq just before Saddam Hussein installs himself as President, the Assyrian narrator of An Iraqi in Paris, Samuel Shimon, dreams of becoming a Hollywood film-maker after his hero John Ford, but after arrest and torture in Syria – accused of being a Jewish spy on account of his name, similar treatment in Jordan, and escaping execution in Lebanon by armed militia, he eventually lands on the streets of Paris, where he meets up with Jean Valjean and tries to escape his fate as a homeless refugee with wit, humour and amorous adventures, all the while writing the story of his childhood, his deaf-mute father Kika, and film buff Kiryakos. After all his experiences, Samuel Shimon, “the runaway from museums”, writes an urgently needed and timely “manifesto of tolerance”. Translated from the Arabic by Christina Phillips and Piers Amodia with the author.
Samuel Shimon was born into an Assyrian family in 1956 in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq. He left Iraq in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, and got as far as Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. In 1985 he settled in Paris, where he started the small press Gilgamesh Editions, publishing a number of volumes of poetry and fiction by Arab authors including, in 1987, a volume of his own poetry, Old Boy. In 1996 he published a collection of poems Rain on my mother’s letters, in the same year moving to London, where he has lived ever since.
He co-founded Banipal magazine, and from September 2010 has been its Editor. In 2000, he and his wife Margaret Obank (co-founder and publisher of Banipal) edited A Crack on the Wall poems by sixty contemporary Arab poets.