Gaza 2035

Haytham el-Wardany’s most recent book in Arabic is Banat Awa and the Missing Letters (2023), which considers forgotten expressions of hope within Arabic fables, where animals speak and humans listen. His publications translated into English include The Book of Sleep (Al-Karma, 2017; Seagull Books, 2020) and How to Disappear (Kayfa ta, 2013, 2017, 2021). He lives and works in Berlin. (updated 4/2025)

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She has translated books by Sara Abou Ghazal, Raja Alem, Shady Lewis, Ahmed Naji, and Adania Shibli. Her translations have been awarded, among other honors, the James Tait Black Prize for fiction and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and been named finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Review of Books Online, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best Literary Translations and The Penguin Book of the International Short Story. (updated 10/2026)