Taleb Alrefai was born in Kuwait in 1958. He is the award-winning author of a dozen novels and several collections of short stories. He was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters) in France in 2023.

Kay Heikkinen is a translator and academic who holds a PhD from Harvard University and was Ibn Rushd Lecturer of Arabic at the University of Chicago. Among other books, she has translated Naguib Mahfouz’s In the Time of Love and Radwa Ashour’s The Woman from Tantoura and the Granada trilogy.