Humphrey T. Davies

Humphrey T. Davies is a translator of Arabic fiction, historical and classical texts. Born in Great Britain, he studied Arabic in college and graduate school. He has worked for decades in the Arab world and been based in Cairo since the late 20th century. He has translated at least 18 Arabic works into English, including contemporary literature. He is a two-time winner of the Banipal Prize.

Born in Great Britain, Humphrey Davies studied Arabic at Cambridge University and the American University in Cairo's Centre for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) in the 1960s. After working in the Arabic world and as a translator for years, he completed a PhD in Arabic in 1981 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Davies has worked for NGOs and funding institutions in a number of countries in the Arab world, including Save the Children in Palestine and the Ford Foundation in Sudan. He began translating in 1997. Since the early 21st century, he has focused solely on literary translation.

Davies has translated both classical and colloquial Arabic texts and has noted in particular his "respect for colloquial Arabic." He worked in collaboration on the El-Said Badawi Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic. Davies began translating while working on a critical edition and lexicon of Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded), a 17th-century Egyptian text on Ottoman rural culture. This is considered a valuable source for the period's colloquial Egyptian Arabic.

Davies' first published translation was a short story by Sayed Ragab, which appeared in Banipal magazine in 2000. Since then, he has translated several well-known works of Arabic literature, including Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (Arabic: عمارة يعقوبيان‎‎, ʿImārat Yaʿqūbīān, 2002). His 2004 translation was voted one of 50 outstanding translations in the last 50 years by the British Society of Authors. His translation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury's novel Gate of the Sun (Arabic: باب الشمس‎‎, Bab al-shams), won the English PEN "Writers in Translation" award and the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

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