Khaled Khalifa

Khaled Khalifa is an award-winning Syrian novelist, screenwriter and poet, born 1964 in Aleppo. Some of his works which are critical of the Syrian government under Baathist rule have been banned by the Syrian government.

He attended the University of Aleppo, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in law. He wrote poetry and was a member of the Literary Forum there. As a screenwriter, Khalifa has written several television dramas including "Rainbow" (Kaws Kozah) and "Memoirs of Al-Jalali" (Serat Al-Jalali), documentaries, short films, and the feature-length film "The Shrine Door" (Bab al-Maqam). His first novel, "Haris al-Khadi'a" ("The Guard of Deception") was published in 1993. His second novel, "Dafatir al-Qurbat" ("The Gypsy Notebooks"), was suppressed by the Union of Arab Writers for four years after its publication in 2000.

Khalifa spent 13 years working on "In Praise of Hatred" (Madih al-karahiya), his third novel, which is about how the lives of one family are affected by the battle between the Syrian government and the Muslim Brotherhood. It was published in Damascus in 2006, until it was banned by the Syrian government, when it was republished in Beirut. Khalifa says these sort of book bans come from a bureaucracy which does not represent the higher levels of government, and he favors negotiation between artists and Syrian authorities to facilitate freedom of speech. His work is not intended to advocate any political ideology. Discussing "In Praise of Hatred," he said "above all, I wrote this novel in defense of the Syrian people and in order to protest against the suffering they have endured as a result of the religious and political dogmas that have tried to negate their ten-thousand-year civilisation." In Praise of Hatred was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2008).

His fourth novel was "La sakakin fi matabikh hadhihi al-madina" ("No Knives in this City's Kitchens"), published in Cairo in 2013. It is about the "price that Syrians have paid under the rule of the Baath party" as headed by President Bashaar Al-Assad. It won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. It was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.