Qais Akbar Omar is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the coauthor, with Stephen Landrigan, of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden (Haus Publishing, 2015), later dramatized by BBC Radio. He has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times, and The Globe and Mail, and his short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. In 2014–15 Omar was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University. (updated 4/2024)