Mahmoud Saeed, a prominent Iraqi novelist, has written more than twenty novels and short story collections. He was imprisoned several times and left Iraq in 1985 after the authorities banned the publication of some of his novels, including Zanka bin Baraka (1970), which won the Ministry of Information Award in 1993. His novels available in English are The World through the Eyes of Angels and Saddam City.  He lives in Chicago. In Fall 2014, he will become the first writer-in-residence at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, Kurdistan.