Born in 1967, Taissier Khalaf is a Syrian novelist and researcher who published the short story collection "Other Cats" (1993), followed by his novel "Notebooks of the Inclining Shoulder" (1996). Khalaf has authored over 50 works in literature, historical studies, and travel writing, most notably "An Encyclopaedia of the Journeys of the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine" (2009), "Moviola" (2013), "The Slaughter of the Philosophers" (2016), "Darwin’s Sparrows" (2018), "‘The King of Thieves" (2022), and "The Andalusian Messiah" that was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2025.