Biographical note

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals - later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands.

Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.

Alaa Al Aswany was born in 1957. A dentist by profession, he is the internationally bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building - which sold over one million copies worldwide - Chicago, The Automobile Club of Egypt and The Republic of False Truths. His award-winning novels have been translated into more than thirty languages and published in over a hundred countries. He has received many prestigious international awards, among them the Bashrahil Prize, the Kavafis Award, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.