Alessandro Spina was the nom de plume of Basili Shafik Khouzam. Born into a family of Syrian Maronites in Benghazi in 1927, Khouzam was educated in Italian schools and attended university in Milan. Returning to Libya in 1954 to help manage his father's textile factory, Khouzam remained in the country until 1979, when the factory was nationalized by Gaddafi, at which point he retired to his country estate in Franciacorta, where he died in 2013. The Confines of the Shadow (Morcelliana) was awarded the Bagutta Prize, Italy's highest literary accolade, in 2007. André Naffis-Sahely was born in Venice in 1985 to an Iranian father and an Italian mother, but raised in Abu Dhabi. His debut collection of poems, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life, will be published by Penguin in August 2017. He is also a literary translator from the Italian and the French. His Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, winner of a PEN Translates award, was published by Carcanet in 2016.
"A rare and valuable perspective on the history of Italy and Libya and, more generally, European colonialism in the Middle East"--Hisham Matar, The TLS
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