Denys Johnson-Davies was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1922 and spent the first twelve years of his life in Cairo, Wadi Halfa, Kampala and Kenya. He studied Arabic and Farsi at the University of Cambridge before taking up positions in the BBC Arabic Service and at Cairo University.

His first work was a self-financed book of Arabic Stories in translation; he has since gone on to translate over 30 novels, short story collections, plays and poetry collections, as well as a book by al-Ghazali from his series Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din and (as co-translator) three volumes of Hadith literature. As a writer, he has published more than fifty children’s books, mostly adapted classical Arabic stories and many published by Dubai-based Jerboa Books. He has also written Memories in Translation, his autobiography with an introduction by the late Naguib Mahfouz. In recent years he has published several anthologies of Arabic literature, including volumes devoted to Tewfik al-Hakim and Yusuf Idris; he also has a forthcoming collection of short stories from the UAE entitled In a Fertile Desert.

Denys Johnson-Davies has been described by the late Edward Said as “the leading Arabic-English translator of our time”, while the British Council say his “role in the history of cultural relations between Arab countries and the rest of the world is unique and unlikely ever to be repeated”. In 2007 he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Prize as Personality of the Year for his services to Arabic literature.