Hecham Mechbal (Morocco) is a researcher and novelist, born in 1979. He obtained a PhD in Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis from Tetouan University, where he is a member of the Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis forum. His field of research is rhetoric and narrative. As well as a number of academic studies, he is the author of a biography of a political prisoner, Dreams of the Darkness (2003) and two novels: The Free Bird (2009) and Bells of Fear (2014). He is a regular contributor to academic journals and participant in seminars in Morocco and abroad. His novel The Free Bird won the Moroccan Channel 2 Prize in its third edition, and in 2010 he was awarded the Abdelmalek Essaadi University Award for Excellence.