Khaled Khalifa

Khaled Khalifa is a Syrian novelist and screenwriter, born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1964. He holds a BA in Law from Aleppo University. He has written many successful screenplays for TV series and for cinema. He is also a regular contributor to a number of Arabic newspapers. His third novel, In Praise of Hatred (2006), was shortlisted for IPAF in 2008, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013 and has been translated into several languages. His fourth novel, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City (2013), reached the IPAF shortlist in 2014 and won the 2013 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, before being published in English. The English edition of his next novel, Death is Hard Work (2016), was a finalist for the 2019 US National Book Award for Translated Literature.

(Photo credit Rabee Mohammad)