Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabaia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He attended school in Gaza. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Birzeit and a masters’ degree from Bradford. Recently, he received his PhD in political and social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of five novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000), The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003 & 2006), and A Suspended Life (2014), shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF). He has also published two collections of short stories, Everything is Normal (2004) and Still Life: Stories from Gaza Time (2013), as well as several books on politics. He is a regular contributor to a number of Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals. In 2014 Atef edited The Book of Gaza, as part of Comma Press’s “City in Short Fiction” series, which featured ten short stories by ten contemporary authors from the Strip.