Denys Johnson-Davies was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on June 21, 1922. He received a degree in Arabic from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. During World War II, he joined the Arabic section of the BBC. After the war, he moved to Cairo and taught translation at the British Institute.
He translated more than 30 Arabic novels, short-story collections, and anthologies including Modern Arabic Short Stories, The Time and the Place and Other Stories, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, Arabian Nights and Days, Echoes of an Autobiography, Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World, and Homecoming: 60 Years of Egyptian Short Stories. He also wrote books for children, a memoir entitled Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature, and a collection of his own writing entitled Fate of a Prisoner and Other Stories. He died on May 22, 2017 at the age of 94.
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