An Eagle on the Next Table

Khaled Khalifa

After a long writing career, crowned with numerous awards, Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa returns to himself, channeling voices from within this time. Unlike his lengthy novels, which depicted the suffering and perspectives of others, he now lays his own views on the table, revealing his thoughts on writing and writers for the first time, always holding fast to freedom. Khalifa revisits chapters from his childhood and his early days with writing, never stumbling when recounting past setbacks. Instead, he gracefully leaps over them, viewing the world, as usual, with a mixture of love and disdain. A Syrian screenwriter and novelist (born in Aleppo, 1964). His works have been translated into many languages. He has six novels: "The Guard of Deception" (1993), "The Romani's Notebooks" (2000), "In Praise of Hatred" (2006) which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, "No Knives in This City's Kitchens" (2013) which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013, "Death is Hard Work" (2016), and "No One Prayed Over Their Graves" (2019) which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The writer also has several television series, including "The Biography of Al-Jalali" (1999) and the series "Relative Calm" (2009). "He controls the concept of time, using it as a narrative that sometimes breaks and sometimes continues through characters that appear then disappear," Al Arabiya TV website.