Yasser Abdel Hafez （Egypt）
Novelist and literary editor. His first novel On the Occasion of Life was longlisted for The Arabic Booker Prize 2008 and his second novel The Book of Safety won the Sawiris Award for the best novel of an established writer. The novel was translated into English and won The Saif Ghobash Banipal Translation Prize 2017. He is currently the managing editor of Akhbar al-Adab literary newspaper. He also worked as the managing director of a couple of cultural magazines. Yasser traveled to many countries and wrote numerous successful travel repotages, among them a highly acclaimed reportage on the cultural scene and the daily life in besieged Iraq (published in 2001) and another well received one about the situation in Kurdistan region after the occupation of Iraq. His third novel Platitude is due to be published in 2019.