Naim Kattan is a Francophone Canadian novelist, essayist, and critic. Born in Baghdad in 1928, Naim Kattan attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle school and took a deep interest in Arabic and French literature at an early age. He studied law at the University of Baghdad from 1945 until 1947, then took a French government scholarship to study at the Sorbonne from 1947 to 1951, where he became active in Parisian literary circles. His fictionalized memories of these years appeared as Adieu, Babylone(1975; translated as Farewell, Babylon, 1976; 2nd ed. 2007) and Les Fruits arrachés (1…