Abdellah Taïa

Abdellah Taïa was born in 1973 in the public library of Rabat, Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old. He is the first Arab author to come out as gay. He writes in French and has published nine novels (many translated into English and other languages), including L’armée du salut (2006), Une mélancolie arabe (2008), Infidèles (2012), Un pays pour mourir (2015), Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (2017), La vie lente (2019) and Vivre à ta lumière (2022). His novel Le jour du Roi was awarded the French Prix de Flore in 2010. Salvation Army, his first movie as a director, is adapted from his eponymous novel. The film was selected for the Venice Film Festival 2013, TIFF 2013, New Directors 2014 and won many international prizes. His novel A Country for Dying, translated into English by Seven Stories Press, won the Pen America Literary Awards 2021. In the US, his novels are translated and published by Semiotext(e) among them Salvation Army, An Arab Melancholia and Another Morocco, and Seven Stories Press, including Infidels and A Country for Dying. 

Jordan Elgrably is an American, French and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and the Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001–2020). He is the editor of Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights 2024), and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumūd: a New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories Press 2025). Based in Montpellier, France and California, he tweets at Blue Sky.