Qais Akbar Omar

is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers that has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Sunday Times, the Boston Globe, the Globe and Mail, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, and published short stories in the Southern Review, AGNI, the Hopkins Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Omar was born in 1982 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–15.