In 1990 the Palestinian American critic Edward Said wrote that “of all the major world literatures, Arabic remains relatively unknown and unread in the west [when its] literature is at a particularly interesting juncture”. At the time, western academic scholars of Arabic were dismissive of modern Arab writing, and few outside the Arab world were aware of its vitality – in poetry and the short story, and especially in the novel. Subsequently, the position of Arabic literature in English translation was transformed: this was due to the contribution made, more than anyone else, by Denys Johnson-Davies, who has died aged 94.

His seven-decade career of translating began when he went to Cairo in 1946 for the British Council. He became friends with Arab writers, read a great deal of contemporary Arabic fiction and embarked on translating it into English.

This activity became, in his own words, an “addiction”, for there was little or no reward. He translated stories, novels, plays and poetry, first at his own expense and later with a return that barely covered the costs of paper and ink. “Where would the cultural world be without its translators?” he wrote.

The award of the Nobel prize in literature in 1988 to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz helped increase awareness of Arabic literature, but the awarding committee had known Mahfouz’s work only through English and French translations. Denys was Mahfouz’s first English translator, and a friend from the 1940s onwards – indeed, he had long been telling the Egyptian literary establishment that Cairo possessed an outstanding writer.

In 1998, the magazine Banipal was founded; coming out three times a year, it has contained translations of all major contemporary Arab writers. In 2007 the International Prize for Arabic Fiction was set up. Both had Denys’s support, and built on his work to the extent that modern Arabic writing in translation is now one of the best-known foreign literatures in English.

Denys was born in Vancouver, the son of a lawyer-teacher father, and spent his childhood in Canada, Cairo, Uganda and Sudan. He picked up Arabic from Sudanese children and shopkeepers in Wadi Halfa, near the country’s border with Egypt. At the age of 12 he travelled to England by himself to attend Merchant Taylors’ school in Hertfordshire as a boarder. Undistinguished academically and socially miserable, he excelled at squash, becoming the school’s champion at the age of 14. The school, however, allowed only senior boys to use the courts for practice. Denys’s father presented it with an ultimatum: either the rule was relaxed or Denys was withdrawn. The headmaster was adamant and Denys left.

He was offered a place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, to read Arabic when he was 16, and filled the two years till he could take it up with studying. Once there, he spent five terms qualifying for a “war degree”. Five years working with the Arabic section of the BBC followed. During this time he published some short stories, a thriller novel (under an assumed name) and his first translations from Arabic.

His postwar spell in Cairo saw his first volume of translation, a collection of stories by Mahmud Teymour (1947). After returning to Britain in 1949, he studied to become a barrister and practised successfully, as well as continuing to write and translate. He set up a company dealing with commercial translations from Arabic and in the early 1960s founded an Arabic literary magazine, Aswat (Voices).

He tried to interest British publishers in contemporary Arabic writing, and in 1968 Oxford University Press published a volume of his translations of short stories, while Heinemann brought out his translations of the work of the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, in its successful African Writers series. Heinemann invited Denys to be consultant for a comparable Arab Authors series, but this was not as successful: there were not the large markets of potential English readers of Arabic as there were – in east and west Africa – for African writers. There was, moreover, the challenge of finding good translators. Denys, indeed, translated most of the series.

In the late 1960s Denys found a new career, as director of a local Arabic language radio station in the Trucial States. This was initiated by the British government, and Denys became first secretary at the British Mission in Dubai, doubling as an interpreter in the negotiations between local rulers and British officials that led to the creation of the United Arab Emirates.

During the 1970s and 80s he was a business consultant in Beirut and in Cairo, helping construction companies develop work in the rapidly developing Gulf states. He finally settled in Cairo, where he was a consultant to the department of comparative literature at the American University. In his 60s, 70s and 80s, hardly a year went by without a volume of translation appearing – novels and short stories by Yahya Taher Abdullah, Salwa Bakr, Mohamed El-Bisatie and Sonallah Ibrahim; plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim; poetry by Mahmoud Darwish.

There were also anthologies of stories and plays, a volume of his own short stories, mostly based in the Arab world, and his tales for children based on Arab and Muslim themes.

In 2006 the American University in Cairo published his autobiography, Memories in Translation, with a foreword by Mahfouz. The following year Denys was awarded the Sheikh Zayed book award as cultural personality of the year.

His life also included a spiritual odyssey. His father, the son of an Anglican clergyman, was an atheist, his mother a Catholic; Denys was for many years attracted to Buddhism, but in later years embraced Islam, taking the name Abdul Wadud. As an act of piety he co-translated two volumes of hadith, the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad.

Denys was married three times, and is survived by his third wife, the photographer Paola Crociani, and a son from his first marriage.

• Denys Johnson-Davies, translator, born 21 June 1922; died 22 May 2017