Jonathan Wright studied Arabic at Oxford University in the 1970s and has spent eighteen of the past thirty years in the Arab world, mostly as a journalist with the international news agency Reuters. His first major literary translation was of Khaled el-Khamissi’s best-selling book Taxi, published in English by Aflame Books in 2008. Other translations include the novel Azazeel by Youssef Ziedan, for which he won the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and two collections of short stories by Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, one of which, The Iraqi Christ, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014.