About the writers

Zaher al-Ghafri (Oman, 1956). Al-Ghafri earned his degree in Philosophy from Mohammed V University in Rabat in 1982. He has lived in several countries and continents, including Iraq, Morocco, France and America. He currently lives in Sweden. His work has been published in most of the Arab world’s cultural journals. In 2006, he was given the Kika Award for Poetry. Several of his poems have been translated into various languages: Spanish, English, German, Swedish, French, Hindi. He has had various poetry books published, including: White Hooves (1983), Silence Comes to Confess (1991), Solitude Which Overflows from Night (1993), Flowers in a Well (2000), Shades of Water Color (2006), Every Time an Angel Appears in the Fortress (2008), The Five Groups (2013), One Life and Many Stairs (2017), Sleep Stone (2020), Napoleon’s Delirium (2021).

Saïd Khatibi (Bou Saada, Algeria, 1984) is a novelist, travel writer, translator and cultural journalist. He earned his bachelor’s degree in French Literature from the University of Algiers and a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the Sorbonne. He writes in Arabic and French and translates between the two languages. He has written three novels in Arabic: Hatab Sarajevo [Sarajevo Firewood], nominated for the International Arab Fiction Award in 2020; Kitab al-Khataya (The Book of Errors, Editorial ANEP 2013), and a novel about Swiss traveler Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), Arba’un ‘ama fi intidhar Isabel (Awaiting Isabel for Forty Years), for which he was awarded with the Katara Prize in 2018. Sarajevo Firewood was published by Banipal Books in English this September. Saïd Khatibi is currently living in Slovenia.

Rasha Omran (Tartus, Syria, 1964) earned her degree in Arabic Literature from the University of Damascus and was a member of the Arab Writers Union from 1985 to 2011. For 18 years, she chaired the organizing committee of the Al-Sindiyan Syrian Culture Festival until it was suspended because of the war. She has six collections of poems to her credit and has taken part in several Arab and international poetry awards, as well as having published an anthology of Syrian poetry from 1980 to 2008. Banipal Magazine has published poems from her divan The Woman Who Lived at Home Before Me (al-lati sakanat al-bait qabli, Dar al mutawasit, Milan, 2016), and a selection of her poems has been translated into Swedish, French and Italian. She currently resides in Cairo and publishes a weekly opinion piece in the Arabic press. 

Samuel Shimon was born to a poor Assyrian family in Iraq in 1956. He left his country in 1979, with the dream of going to Hollywood to become a film director. Instead, he has lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis. He settled in Paris as a refugee in 1985. In 1996, he moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He co-founded Banipal magazine in 1997. In 2005, his successful autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Pariswas published, with various editions in Beirut, Cairo, Baghdad, Algeria and Casablanca. It has also been published in English, French, Kurdish, Swedish and Hebrew. A review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has described him as “the Initiator” and “a tireless missionary for literary affairs.”