Michelle Hartman

Michelle Hartman is an academic and translator. She obtained a BA from Columbia College in 1993 and a DPhil from Oxford University in 1998. She is currently a professor of Arabic and francophone literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. She is the author of a number of academic papers and several monographs including Breaking Broken English: Black Arab Literary Solidarities and the Politics of Language, which won the College Language Association award for creative scholarship in 2020. She is also a translator of contemporary Arabic literature, and has translated twelve novels and a short story collection, including Iman Humaydan Younes’s Wild Mulberries and The Weight of Paradise, Alexandra Chreiteh's Always Coca-Cola and Ali and His Russian Mother, Shahla Ujayli's Summer with the Enemy and A Sky So Close to Us and Jana Elhassan's The Ninety-Ninth Floor and All the Women Inside Me, among others. Wild Mulberries was shortlisted for the 2009 Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary. She also co-translated A Long Walk from Gaza in 2024.