Raja Alem was born in Mecca and now lives in Paris. Her works include ten novels, two plays, biography, short stories, essays, literary journalism, writing for children, and collaborations with artists and photographers. She has received many awards in the Arab world and in Europe, including from UNESCO for creative achievement in 2005 and from the Lebanese Literary Club in Paris in 2008. In 2011, she became the first woman to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction, also known as the “Arabic Booker,” for her novel The Dove’s Necklace.
Leri Price is a literary translator based in the UK. In 2017, her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City (Hoopoe, 2016) was short-listed for both the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)’s National Translation Awards and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
