Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He has written numerous screenplays and is the author of several novels, including Death is Hard Work, which won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and was a finalist for the National Book Awards. In Praise of Hatred, which was shortlisted for IPAF in 2008, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013 and has been translated into several languages. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war.Leri Price is the translator of Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, as well as the prize-winning Death is Hard Work, for which she is the recipient of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.