Ahmed Naji is a writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and criminal. His novel Using Life (2014) made him the only writer in Egyptian history to have been sent to prison for offending public morality. Other published novels in Arabic are Tigers, uninvited (2020) and The happy end (2022). Naji has won several prizes, including a Dubai Press Club Award, and PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. For more about his work, visit ahmednaji.net

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem's The Dove's Necklace won the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, and she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany's Things That Can't Be Fixed. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival, and shorter texts have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She is also an agent at teneleven, a translator-led agency for contemporary Arabic literature.