Zahran Alqasmi is an Omani poet and novelist, born in the Sultanate of Oman in 1974. He is also a medical doctor, with a specialization in infectious diseases, and keeps bees. Honey Hunger is his third of four published novels and his English language debut. In 2023 he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for The Water Diviner. He has also published ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi includeBitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies,which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.
