Ghayath Almadhoun (b. 1979) is a Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish poet who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Damascus. In 2006 he co-founded Bayt al-Qasid, “The House of Poetry,” together with Syrian poet Lukman Derky in Damascus. He has published four books in Arabic, and has been translated into many other languages. In 2014, his collaboration with Marie Silkeberg, Till Damaskus, was published in Sweden. In 2017, a selection of his work, Adrenalin, was published in the U.S. by Action Books in Catherine Cobham’s translation.

Catherine Cobham is head of Department of Arabic and Persian at the University of St. Andrews and has translated the works of many Arab writers, inluding Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Fuad al-Takarli, Yusuf Idris, and Hanan al-Shaykh.