Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, reporter, and photographer. He was born in Cairo in 1976. His work has appeared in English in the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, Parnassus, Aeon Magazine, McSweeney’s, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the author of seven books in Arabic, some of which have been translated into German, Polish, Slovak, and Italian. Rakha was chosen as one of the best-known and loved new voices of modern Arabic literature at the Hay Festival/Beirut World Book Capital competition, Beirut39. The Crocodiles and The Book of the Sultan's Seal are Rakha’s first novels to appear in English.