Anton Shammas was one of six children born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, who moved to Fassuta in the north of the British Palestine in 1937 to teach at the local girls' school.
In 1962, the family moved to Haifa where Shammas studied in an integrated Jewish-Arab high school.
[2] Shammas left Jerusalem in 1987 and now lives in the United States, where he is a professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.
[2] In 1974, Shammas published his first collection of poetry in Arabic, "Imprisoned in my Own Awakening and Sleep" (Arabic: اسير يقظتي ونومي ), as well as a collection of Hebrew poems, "Hardcover" (Hebrew: כריכה קשה).
His acclaimed Hebrew novel Arabesques (1986) was translated into eight languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, although it has never appeared in Arabic.