Born in Iraq in 1967, Muhsin Al-Ramli is a writer, poet, translator, and lecturer, and writes in Arabic and Spanish. Saddam Hussein’s regime harassed his family and condemned his brother, the poet and writer Hassan Mutlak, to death in 1990. Al-Ramli has lived in exile since 1993. He lives in Madrid, where he is a professor at Saint Louis University. He is the founder and co-editor of the journal ALWAH, the only Arabic cultural magazine in Spain, and collaborates with many important literary magazines in the Arab world. He is the author of several books, including short story collections, plays, poetry, nonfiction, and novels, and has translated a number of Spanish classics into Arabic. He was awarded the Young Writers Prize for short stories in 1988 and 1989, and was longlisted for the Arab Booker Prize in 2008 for Fingers of Dates and in 2013 for The President’s Gardens.
