Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944, and graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University in 1967. His poems have been published in Beirut, Amman, and Cairo since 1972, and his Collected Works were published in Cairo in 1997. He lives in Cairo. Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She is the bestselling author of In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Edward W. Said, an internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, is university professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books, including Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism.