Anton Shammas

Anna Bernard (King's College London)

Ed. by Ziad Elmarsafy, King's College London
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 6.1.1: Israeli and Palestinian Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Anna Bernard (King's College London), Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London), Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Nora Parr (SOAS, University of London), Rita Sakr (Maynooth University), Anastasia Valassopoulos (University of Manchester)

Dates

Born 1950
Activity 1974-ongoing

Places

Born in Israel
Active in Israel; Palestine; United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Poet

Other

Children's/Young Adult writer
Playwright / Dramatist
Translator

Resources

Anton Shammas’ only novel Arabesques (Arabesqot, 1986) is notoriously difficult to classify, and even more difficult to summarize. It is a Hebrew novel in which Palestinians are the protagonists and Jewish Israelis are marginal players. It appears to be openly autobiographical: the narrator is also named Anton Shammas, and, like the real Shammas, he is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, born in 1950 in Fassuta, a Christian village in the Galilee. Yet the text disrupts any assumption of its veracity, announcing in its epigraph, “This autobiography is a disguised novel.” Its plot is exceptionally intricate, moving rapidly between the magical and the mundane, the mythic and the historic, in a manner that recalls the novel’s title: its episodes are “plaited into one another, embracing and parting, twisting and twining in the infinite arabesque of memory”...

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1763 words

Citation: Bernard, Anna. "Anton Shammas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 August 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13076, accessed 09 June 2026.]