Name: Khaled Abbas Country: Egypt

Abbas emigrated to Germany 15 years ago to study history of art in Berlin. He has translated extracts from works by Salah Jahin, Naguib Sorrour and Omar El-Khayam. It was while he was trying to turn these translations into a performance piece that he first realised how little information was available in Germany on Arabic literature. In the mid-nineties he wrote and produced The Arab Chess Game, a play addressing the absence of any real dialogue between East and West, and once again came face to face with the paucity of any understanding of contemporary Arabic literature. In an attempt to bridge the gap Abbas set up the Sphinx Books Agency, with offices in both Berlin and Cairo. Arab authors can submit works to the agency which will undertake marketing in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Most recently Sphinx Books Agency sold the rights of Khaled El Khamisy’s Taxi to Aflame Books in the UK.

Name: Bahaa Taher Country: Egypt

Taher was born in Cairo in 1935.  He holds postgraduate diplomas in history and mass media from Cairo University. Since he published his first short story in 1964 he has published 14 books (6 novels, 4 short story collections and 4 non-fiction works) many of which have been translated. After working as a translator at the United Nations in Geneva in the 1980s and 90s, he returned to Egypt and received much literary acclaim for his work. He represents an illuminated Egyptian and Arabic nationalism, which draws inspiration from the principles of freedom and social justice. His style is direct, concise and highly poetic. He received the State Award of Merit in Literature, Egypt’s highest honour for writing, in 1998, and the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize for his novel Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery in 2000. His novel Love in Exile is published in English by the AUC Press. In 2008 Taher was the first winner of the $50,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel Sunset Oasis. Published in Cairo by Dar Al Shorouk, the novel explores one man’s existential crisis.

Name: Elias Farkouh Country: Jordan

Farkouh was born in Amman in 1948. He has a BA in philosophy and psychology from the Arab University of Beirut. He worked in cultural journalism from 1977 to 1979. He also took part in editing Almahd magazine, a cultural publication. Farkouh was a partner with Taher Riyad in the publishing house Manarat till 1990. He established Azminah for Publishing and Distribution in 1992. His novel Kamat Az-Zabad - translated as Columns of Foam - won the State Encouragement Award in 1990. He also won the State Merit Award for his short story writing in 1997. In 1992 he won the Jordanian Writers’ Association Mahmud Sayf Ed-Din Irani award for his short story collection Twenty One Shots for the Prophet.  He is one of the founding members of the Jordanian Publisher’s Union.

Name: Fakhri Saleh Country: Palestine

Saleh was born in Jenin, West Bank, Palestine in 1957. He has a BA in English literature and philosophy and an MA in English literature from the University of Jordan. He has researched and written about Arabic literature in the 20^th century and has translated works of literary theory from English into Arabic. He was awarded in 1997 the Palestine Prize for Literary Criticism and in 2003 the Ghalib Halasa Prize for his cultural contribution to literary criticism and translation from English into Arabic. Saleh is also an essayist and contributes regularly to many learned journals and newspapers in the Arab world and Europe. He is a past Vice President of the Arab Writers Union and is now the Head of the cultural department in Al-Dustour daily based in Amman (Jordan) and Head of the Jordanian Association of Critics.