Shahla Ujayli is a Syrian writer, born in 1976. She holds a doctorate in Modern Arabic Literature and Cultural Studies from Aleppo University in Syria and currently teaches Modern Arabic Literature at the University of Aleppo and the American University in Madaba, Jordan. She is the author of a short-story collection entitled The Mashrabiyya (2005) and two novels: The Cat's Eye (2006), which won the Jordan State Award for Literature in 2009, and Persian Carpet (2013). She has also published a number of critical studies, including The Syrian Novel: Experimentalism and Theoretical Categories (2009), Cultural Particularity in the Arabic Novel (2011) and Mirror of Strangeness: Articles on Cultural Criticism (2006). In 2017, she won the Al Multaqa Prize for her short-story collection The Bed of the King’s Daughter. Michelle Hartman is an associate professor of Arabic and francophone literature at McGill University in Montreal. She is the translator of numerous novels from Arabic, including Iman Humaydan’s Wild Mulberries, B as in Beirut, and The Weight of Paradise, Alexandra Chreiteh’s Always Coca-Cola, and Jana Elhassan’s The Ninety-Ninth Floor.