Taleb Alrefai Author

Taleb Alrefai is a well-known Kuwaiti novelist and short-story-writer, born in 1958, who started publishing short stories in local newspapers when he was an engineering student at the University of Kuwait in the mid-1970s. Shadow of the Sun (2000 and 2012, Dhil al-Shams), centring on the suffering of Egyptian and other foreign workers in Kuwait, is his first novel. In 2002, he was awarded the State Prize for Letters for his novel Ra’ihat al-Bahr (Scent of the Sea). In 2011 he founded Al-Multaqa (Cultural Circle), a regular literary discussion forum in Kuwait City, which led to the founding of the annual Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story in 2016. That year his novel Fi al-Huna (Here and There) was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and now has a French edition. His novel Al-Najdi (2017, The Mariner) has editions in English (Banipal Books, 2020, and Spiracle audiobook 2022), French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Turkish. He lives in Kuwait City and works as a creative writing lecturer at the American University of Kuwait.