Name: Aziz Chouaki Country: Algeria

Chouaki was born in Algeria in 1951. He learned to play the guitar to the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix – music later forbidden by the regime. Playing in nightclubs and studying literature soon became his focus. In the 1990s he moved to France. He became well known for his work Les Oranges.  His novels Baya, l’Etoile d’Alger, Aigle, Arobase and also his theatre plays El Maestro, L’Arrêt de Bus, Une Virée, Bazar, Chouaki can be distinguished by his point of view on the world situation.

Name: Faiza Guene Country: Algeria/France

Guene was born in France in 1985 to Algerian parents. She wrote her first novel, Just Like Tomorrow when she was 17 years old. It was a huge success in France, selling over 360,000 copies and translation rights around the world. Guene lives in Paris where she is also making films.

Name: Khaled El Khamisy Country: Egypt

El Khamisy was born in Cairo in 1962. He holds an MA in political science from the Sorbonne University. He worked for the National Institute for Social Studies and then Al Ahram Newspaper. He is now the owner and the CEO of Nile Production Company, which has produced a number of drama and documentary films and series.  He is the author of Taxi, which was published in Arabic by Dar El Shorouk (2007) and which will be published in English in 2008. He writes weekly articles in a number of daily Egyptian newspapers, including Al Ahram, ElMasry Elyom and the Daily News. He co-scripted the Egyptian television series Noffel Prize.

Name: Radwa Ashour Country: Egypt

Ashour was born in Cairo in 1946. She has published seven novels, three collections of short stories and four books of criticism. Part I of her Granada Trilogy won the 1994 Cairo International Book Fair Book of the Year Award; the Trilogy won First Prize at the First Arab Woman Book Fair in 1995. Part I of the Trilogy was translated into English and the whole trilogy was translated into Spanish.The Italian translation of Atyaaf (Ghosts) will be published by Ilisso in September 2008. Ashour co-edited the four-volume Encyclopedia of Arab Women Writers: 1873-1999 (2005). She also supervised and edited the Arabic translation of Vol. 9 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (2006). Ashour was awarded the 2007 Constantine Cavafi Prize for Literature. She is currently professor of English and Comparative Literature, Ain Shams University, Cairo.