Hassanine Ben Ammou Follow

Hassanine Ben Ammou is a leading Tunisian novelist and visual artist born in Dar Chaabane in 1948. He spearheaded the new Arabic historical novel in Tunisia and has published more than a dozen historical novels that deal with late medieval and early modern Tunisian history, some of which have been adopted for television and radio. He is the recipient of the prestigious Tunisia Novel Grand Prize for Eternal Sunset (al-Ghurub al-khalid) in 2007. Critics and readers compare his novels to those of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), founder of the Arabic historical novel.

William Granara is research professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He specializes in the literature and history of the Arab Mediterranean in both the medieval and modern periods. He translated several novels from Arabic, including The Earthquake (2000), Granada (2004), and The Battle of Poitiers (2011). He is also the author of Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World (2019), Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian: Eulogist for a Falling Homeland (2021) and is co-editor of The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science (2020).