Palestinian Quebecker YARA EL-GHADBAN is an anthropologist by training but has been writing since she was thirteen. She is the author of three novels, of which I Am Ariel Sharon is the first to be translated into English. In 2017 she won the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, and in 2019 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize. She lives and writes in Montreal.WAYNE GRADY is an award-winning author, translator, and editor. He has won the John Glassco Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award two additional times. His debut novel, Emancipation Day, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. He lives near Kingston, Ontario, with his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds.

“Yara El-Ghadban, like any good novelist, is on the side of everyone who’s suffering, so all her characters feel real, contradictory, flawed, and alive. Now her crystalline French has been deftly and beautifully rendered into English by Wayne Grady: ‘I’m a grain of salt on the tongue of the earth. I dissolve in the mouths of the mountains of Sinai.’ This is a richly imagined, vitally important book.” — Steven Heighton, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of The Waking Comes Late

Palestinian Quebecker YARA EL-GHADBAN is an anthropologist by training but has been writing since she was thirteen. She is the author of three novels, of which I Am Ariel Sharon is the first to be translated into English. In 2017 she won the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, and in 2019 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize. She lives and writes in Montreal.WAYNE GRADY is an award-winning author, translator, and editor. He has won the John Glassco Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award two additional times. His debut novel, Emancipation Day, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. He lives near Kingston, Ontario, with his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds.

“Yara El-Ghadban, like any good novelist, is on the side of everyone who’s suffering, so all her characters feel real, contradictory, flawed, and alive. Now her crystalline French has been deftly and beautifully rendered into English by Wayne Grady: ‘I’m a grain of salt on the tongue of the earth. I dissolve in the mouths of the mountains of Sinai.’ This is a richly imagined, vitally important book.” — Steven Heighton, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of The Waking Comes Late