Tarek Eltayeb was born to Sudanese parents in Cairo in 1959, and has lived in Vienna since 1984. He studied at the Institute for Economic Philosophy at Vienna’s University of Economics, and currently teaches at three Austrian universities. He has published two novels, two collections of short stories, five collections of poetry, one play, and an autobiography. His works have been translated into German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Macedonian, Romanian, and Serbian. He is a faculty member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He received the Elias Cannetti Fellowship of the City of Vienna in 2005 and the International Grand Prize for Poetry at the 2007 Curtea de Argeş Festival in Romania. In 2008, he was appointed Austrian Ambassador for the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue. In the same year, he received the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria. His first novel, Cities without Palms, was published in English translation by the AUC Press in 2009. 

Kareem James Abu-Zeid is the translator of Tarek Eltayeb’s Cities without Palms (AUC Press, 2009), for which he was runner-up in the 2010 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.