Nancy Roberts

Nancy Roberts is a freelance Arabic-to-English translator and editor who spent 25 years in the Middle East (Lebanon, Kuwait and Jordan). Her translation of Ghada Samman’s Beirut ’75 won the 1994 Arkansas Arabic Translation Award, and she was awarded the 2018 Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding for her translation of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Gaza Weddings and other works by the same author. In addition to literature, she translates materials on political, economic, and environmental issues; human rights; international development; Islamic thought and movements; and interreligious dialogue. Her most recent literary translations are The Slave Yards by Najwa Bin Shatwan (Syracuse University Press, 2022), Things I Left Behind by Shada Mustafa (Banipal, 2022), The Night Will Have Its Say by Ibrahim al-Koni (Hoopoe, 2022), They Fell Like Stars from the Sky by Sheikha Helawy (Neem Tree Press, 2023), and The Palestinian Odyssey by Walid Saif (forthcoming). She is based in the Chicago suburbs and was apart of the CODEPINK March to Gaza delegation.