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. He is the author of many novels, including Anubis, Gold Dust, The Puppet, The Seven Veils of Seth, The New Oasis, and The Scarecrow (AUC Press, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2015). He was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Prize for Literature in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. Elliott Colla is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University. He has translated a number of Arabic novels, including Ibrahim Aslan's The Heron and Idris Ali's Poor (both AUC Press, 2007). He was runner up in the 2009 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Gold Dust.