Ibrahim al-Koni, was born in Libya in 1948. A Tuareg who writes in Arabic, he spent his childhood in the desert and learned to read and write Arabic when he was twelve. His novels Anubis (2005), Gold Dust (2008), and The Seven Veils of Seth (2009) were published by the American University in Cairo Press, and another novel, The Bleeding of the Stone, has also appeared in English. In 2008 he received the Sheikh Zayed Prize for Literature for his novel Nida’ ma kan ba‘idan (Calling the distant)..In 2010, he received in Cairo the Arab Novel Award and dedicated the value of the prize to the children of the Tuareg tribes from which he originally hails. William M. Hutchins, professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Appalachian State University, is the translator of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Anubis (AUC Press, 2005).