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About
Nancy N. Roberts (b. 1957, Wichita, Kansas) is a distinguished American translator of Arabic, specializing in both classical Islamic scholarship and modern Arabic literary fiction. She earned a BA in Psychology and Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University, an MS in Applied Linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington, and an MA in Arabic Language and Literature from Indiana University. She lived for a year in Lebanon and five years in Kuwait before settling in Amman, Jordan, which served as her base from 1995 to 2015; she is currently based in the Chicago suburbs. An ATA-certified Arabic-to-English translator, she has worked across a wide range of subjects including Islamic jurisprudence, Sufi hagiography, Islamic aesthetics, and modern Arabic fiction. For Fons Vitae she translated the hagiographic classic Lata'if al-Minan of Ibn 'Ata' Allah al-Iskandari as The Subtle Blessings in the Saintly Lives of Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi and His Master and also translated al-Ghazali's chapter on wealth from the Ihya 'Ulum al-Din. She won the University of Arkansas Translation Award for her translation of Ghada Samman's Beirut '75 and received a commendation from the judges of the 2008 Banipal Prize for her translation of Salwa Bakr's The Man from Bashmour.
