Neil Hewison — AUC Press Editor

 

Neil Hewison: Shaping a Body of Modern Arabic Literature in Translation

In October 2017, R. Neil Hewison will retire from his position as Associate Director for Editorial Programs for American University in Cairo Press, after more than thirty years working at the publishing house:

Hewison—an author, translator, publisher, and educator—helped steer the press’s development from its early years through ever-shifting landscapes: from floppy disks to ebooks, through major and minor political events. In these thirty years, Hewison has done perhaps more than any other individual to shape the corpus of Arabic literature in English translation.

Launched in 1960, AUC Press was reorganized in 1984. From then, the press took its uncontested place as the most prolific publisher of Arabic literature in translation. Through nearly all of those years, Hewison has been at the center of the press’s decisions on who and what to translate.

“Without Neil Hewison, the AUC Press would not have become the pioneer publisher of Arabic fiction in English translation,” said multi-award-winning translator Humphrey Davies. “He was, to my knowledge, the only member of the press’s management with the language skills, love of literature in general and of Arabic literature in particular, and taste needed to make this happen.”

Hewison was born in Yorkshire, Eng­land, and, after studying linguis­tics at York University, he chose to join Voluntary Service Overseas. As Hewison said in a 2015 interview with The Arab Weekly, he’d expected put his two years of Swahili to good use.

Instead, he was sent to teach Eng­lish in a secondary college in Fay­oum, Egypt.

While there, Hewison began learning Arabic and writing a seminal book on area, The Fayoum: History and Guide. In 1982, Hewison moved up to Cairo, where he taught English for four years and finished up his Fayoum book, originally published by AUC Press in 1984. Two years after publishing his book, Hewison joined the press.