Barbara S Romaine

Barbara Romaine taught the Arabic language for thirty years, at institutions including UPenn, Middlebury College, Swarthmore College, Princeton University, and Villanova University, among others. Her first book-length translation, Bahaa Taher's Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, was published by the University of California Press in 1995. Since then she has published translations of five more novels, most recently Waiting for the Past (Syracuse University Press, 2022), by the Iraqi novelist Hadiya Hussein. Barbara has held two NEA fellowships in translation, one of which was for her work on Radwa Ashour's Spectres (Interlink Books, 2011). Spectres went on to place second in the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal international translation competition. Barbara's translations of essays, short stories, and classical poetry have appeared in a variety of literary periodicals.